She shakes it off, almost physically, then turns to me.
“This was fun and all, but now I’ve got to ask: What’s the plan?”
I hate to admit it, but I’ve run out of ideas. So I’ve got to do something I never thought I’d do again.
I’m going to call Cantrell.
[12]
I’m not exactly sure when I joined the private sector. One day I checked the bank account where I direct-deposited my paychecks. The money just sat there most of the time. I traveled in government transports and ate in army mess halls. My clothes came from uniform stores, and a packet of spending cash was always included in the kit for any mission. But this time, when I checked my bank’s website, I noticed that my account had more money than I expected. A lot more. I looked at the last few transactions, and discovered that my paychecks were no longer coming from the government, but from a private company called Global Travel, LLC. And they were much bigger.
I asked Cantrell about this the next time I saw him. He gave me his usual smile and said, “You complaining?”
We’d turned into a private military contractor somewhere along the line—or, more accurately, mercenaries. I’d done three tours in Afghanistan and Iraq by then. Suddenly I was officially a civilian again.
Other than that, nothing really changed.
We were still backstopped by U.S. soldiers. We still used the CIA’s jets wherever we went, or hitched a ride on military transports. And our security clearances still got us into every base, government building, and top-secret black site.
The main difference was that I was now free to go back to the States whenever I wasn’t on a mission. I began commuting to the War on Terror.
A lot of the money budgeted for fighting bin Laden and other bad guys went in big crates direct to the Middle East, but there was still plenty left over for salaries and contracts. Cantrell secured us brand-new office space in Crystal City, Virginia, in a corporate park filled with CIA front companies. I found an apartment near Dupont Circle, at the center of a cluster of trendy spots populated by hipsters and young professionals.
I did my best to rejoin the outside world. I studied civilian life like I was reading a mission brief for hostile territory. I learned how to wear a suit instead of a uniform. I began to drink decent whiskey instead of whatever was cheapest on the shelf. And at night, I went out to a lot of places where I faked polite conversation with people while pretending I didn’t know exactly what was going on behind their eyes.
One night I was at an embassy party that Cantrell insisted I attend. It was filled with old, very rich men who talked quietly in small groups, dividing up the globe between dirty jokes. Most of the women were escorts, but there was a small group of civilians: interns, think-tankers, and policy wonks who stuck close to the food trays. They were making the Ivy League equivalent of minimum wage, but they all had big plans. This was the ground level for the New World Order, and they intended to gnaw their way to the top.
That’s where I met Whitney. She was a low-level staffer in the State Department, but already eyeing her path over to Defense or the White House, where the real power flowed. I assembled a quick picture of her from inside her head: perfectly dull home life back in Michigan, father a big political donor, leveraging her intellect and her sharp good looks into one job after another with a machinelike precision.
She’d had a few drinks, but her first impression of me still came through crisp and clear. Deep tan and buzz-cut hair screamed ex-military. Good suit said private contractor, high-dollar salary. The cheap wrinkle-free shirt underneath said I wasn’t quite sure how to spend it yet. The word that kept bouncing around in her brain was
I’ve rarely met anyone so focused outside of a firefight. Even reading her mind didn’t quite prepare me for how fast she made decisions. Within minutes of walking over to me, she’d already mapped out the dark corner of the party where she would allow me to lift her dress and pull down her underwear. She had plans for me, and not just for the night.
Who could say no to someone like that?
Within a month, we were living together. We were a new-model DC power couple, each with our own security clearances and classified briefing books on our bedside tables. The fact that we didn’t actually like each other very much didn’t come up that often.
I was still flying back and forth from the Middle East every couple of weeks. She had her own seventy-hour schedule at work as she and her colleagues planned where to send people like me for the next battle.
Whitney put up with what she called my James Bond lifestyle, and I pretended not to notice the cyclonic rages that could sweep through her at a moment’s notice. Unhappy with her hair, she would throw her brush so hard it would break the mirror. I learned to budget for things like new dishes and minor household repairs. She screamed over the phone at everyone—subordinates, bosses, friends, her parents—with a scorched-earth intensity that had them babbling apologies. Being on the receiving end of one of her rants could trigger a migraine that would last for days.
I kept my talent from her. I justified it because it was classified. But in truth, I didn’t think she’d understand or believe me. And to be totally honest, I just didn’t trust her.
Occasionally, I’d catch a glimpse of a fumbled encounter in her mind, usually on the office couch with her boss or a coworker. She thought of it as tension relief when she couldn’t get to the gym, and stomped any residual guilt under her heel until it quit whimpering. In return, I slept with her girlfriends, who liked her even less than I did. One of the advantages of reading minds is knowing exactly how much you can get away with.
I figured it was as close to normal as someone like me was going to get.
I GOT THE call at home.
“Son, you know I hate to drag you back into the shit,” Cantrell lied, making it sound almost sincere. “But we got a big one. High-value prisoner with beaucoup secrets stashed in his head.”
“What, you finally got Osama?” I joked.
This was long before SEAL Team Six killed bin Laden, back when he was still the bogeyman of the Western world, haunting us all with the occasional message from a hidden cavern somewhere. This was when he was still the most wanted man on the planet.
There was a pause, and I could tell Cantrell was deciding how much he could reveal, even on a secure line.
“No,” he said. “But they say they got someone who knows where to find him. They think they got Osama’s boyfriend.”
It was common knowledge in the business that bin Laden was a pedophile with a thing for underage boys. It was the kind of rumor that probably got started as a bad joke, but then took on a life of its own. In Afghanistan, there’s an old—and seriously fucked-up—tradition of using dancing boys as entertainment at tribal celebrations, the same way a bunch of drunken frat boys will hire a stripper for a bachelor party. The practice, called bacha bazi, gained new life under the Taliban after it came into power, with the boys—as young as ten or eleven—used as sexual party favors by the warlords.
In other words, about what you’d expect from a group that stones women to death for being raped and shoots little girls in the head when they try to learn to read.
Osama was rumored to be a big fan of bacha bazi, even taking his favorite boy toy into the caves of Tora Bora with him when the U.S. bombing started.
But it was just a rumor. There was never any hard intel.
Until we got Prisoner #7461. His given name was Fahran.
Cantrell laid out the whole story for me on the plane ride out of Reagan, on our way to Afghanistan.
They picked him up with a bunch of Taliban hard-liners in Nuristan province. Our guys were out on a presence patrol, reminding the locals of the military might of the United States, when the hard-liners attacked. Most of them retreated into the hills right away. But a group of seven were cut off and surrendered.
Fahran was the youngest of the bunch, and one of the U.S. troops—who�
�d picked up a lot of Pashto in his tours—overheard his friends insulting him. They referred to Fahran as a veteran bacha. And then they said something about his boyfriend coming to rescue him from the satanic Americans: the great Osama bin Laden. The soldier knew the rumors as well as anyone in Afghanistan, so he reported it up the chain of command.
The guys in black uniforms with no rank showed up. They were skeptical at first, but they questioned the other hard-liners. Every one of them gave the same answers. How Fahran had spoken of being bin Laden’s favorite, how he had accompanied Osama everywhere—even to the Saudi’s most recent hiding places.
So they threw a hood over Fahran’s head. Before nightfall, he was in a cell.
But the little dancing boy turned out to be harder than everyone else in his crew. From what Cantrell told me, they’d done their best already. They’d worked on him around the clock, using all the standard tricks in the interrogation manual.
Nothing.
The kid knew where to find bin Laden. But he wouldn’t talk.
Which was why they had paid Cantrell’s insanely high contractor’s fee and had me shipped over on the company’s jet.
To Bagram.
[13]
The phone rings for a while before someone picks up. “Cactus Bar and Grill.”
I rack my brain, trying to remember the proper countersign. “What time is happy hour?”
The guy on the other end sounds bored. “Happy hour is all day, every day.”
“24-7,” I say. “And is it still ladies’ night every night?”
That should be the call-and-response to let the operator know I’m legit, even if it is a couple of years out of date.
“That’s right,” he says. “Anything else I can do for you?”
“Is Nick there?”
Long pause. “Who wants to know?
“I need to leave a message for Nick.”
Another long pause. “Nobody by that name here.”
I’ve been out of the loop for a while, but I can’t believe Cantrell would shut down all his old listening posts. He might not be officially CIA anymore, but he’s still plugged in deep.
“He was a regular there. I need to get in touch with him. Can you take my number, at least? Just in case he comes in.”
“I told you. There’s no Nick here. Sorry.”
“If Nick comes in, let him know I called.”
“Whatever, man.”
He hangs up, and I get the impression I annoyed a perfectly normal bartender for no good reason.
I wait for five minutes, then another ten. Then another ten. Kelsey waits, not sure what I’m doing, but not willing to disturb me.
I’m just about to give up and call some other old numbers when the phone rings.
I hesitate a moment. Then I curse myself for waiting. If you’ve decided to do something, even if it’s hard, you do it. Waiting around doesn’t make the choice any easier.
I pick up the phone and hear the voice of the man who taught me that.
“You must be desperate,” Cantrell says. “Nobody’s called the Cactus in a long time.”
“Well, you didn’t send me a new decoder ring this year.”
He laughs. “That’s what happens when you quit the official Captain Midnight club, kid. You gotta pay the dues if you want to remain a junior birdman. How’s things going?”
I suspect he already knows what’s going on, but I give him a brief, edited version anyway. The job, getting burned, and now being tracked with a kill order on my head.
“Sounds like you got a problem,” Cantrell says.
“Who’s looking out for Preston? As soon as my name came up, they told him to terminate me. What the hell is he into?”
Cantrell laughs again. “You asking me?”
“You always had all the answers.”
“So what makes you think I’m going to give them to you? We already covered this. You quit.”
“Fine,” I say. “Nice talking to you. I’ll see you around.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa there. No need to go sulk in your room yet, princess. I might be able to help you out.”
“I’ll survive on my own. I’m pretty good at that, remember?”
“I’m not so sure anymore,” Cantrell says. He drops the down-home glaze, and his voice becomes clinical and cold. “You’ve got no money, no weapons, no base of operations, and no way to get any of that back without exposure. You’re dragging a civilian around. Even with your talents and training, this story only ends with you on an autopsy table. You’ve fucked the dog pretty good here, John. Honestly, I trained you better than this.”
That stings. I’m surprised—and annoyed—by how much I still want Cantrell to think well of me.
“Why do I get the feeling you knew all this before I ever picked up the phone?”
I can hear the smile in Cantrell’s voice when he answers. At least I redeemed myself a little bit with that question.
“Well, I thought you might get in touch. Preston asked his friends to check you out. I might not be on the official payroll anymore, but they still come to me when one of my kids is out there causing trouble.”
That makes sense. Anyone who wanted information on me would go straight to Cantrell. Which means he’s had plenty of time to think about my problems.
“See, your mistake was underestimating your target. You thought your bullshit cover story would hold up. But you weren’t expecting someone with real muscle to start looking at it. People with access to classified files. Like your personnel records.”
That narrows it down. There are a couple of black-ops agencies with that kind of clearance. But only one that would have the information available that quickly, just sitting on the other end of a search query.
“You’re telling me Preston is working for the CIA?”
Cantrell laughs at the tone in my voice. “Not like it’s an exclusive club. They hired you, didn’t they? Anyway, when those people found out who you were, they immediately gave him the order to drop you because they don’t want you peeking inside his head. Too many secrets in there. Lots of stuff they don’t want out in the world.”
“Like what?”
“Come on, son. That’s classified.”
“They didn’t tell you, did they?”
He laughs. “That’s not considered part of my operational area these days. But let me run a little hypothetical past you. You know the CIA has its own venture capital arm, right? Investing in high-tech companies for the good of the nation and all that?”
“Sure.” Everyone who reads Forbes knows that. It’s called In-Q-Tel.
“Right. The guys you’re up against, they’re like the quiet version of that. The one that doesn’t put out press releases. They’re the ones backing Preston and OmniVore.”
“Yeah, but everybody knows the CIA invests in these kind of companies. It’s not a secret. Why would they suddenly start dropping kill orders?”
Cantrell makes a tsking noise, like this should be obvious. “Well, John, why do you think? You’ve already seen what data mining can do if it’s turned against you. Preston’s got access to every fact in the public record about you. He had your bank account numbers, your address, your mortgage, your passwords, everything, in just a couple hours. What does that tell you?”
I feel like I’m back in training. But I answer anyway. “That he’s inside every one of OmniVore’s clients. He built backdoors into all of their data.”
“Pretty good guess,” Cantrell says. “Now, do you think the CIA might have some interest in the hidden data of every major corporation that’s hired OmniVore? You think they might have some use for searching through every financial transaction a bank makes? Every stock sale that goes through a major brokerage? Being able to trace every credit-card purchase of any customer they want, anywhere they go, anytime? Searching through the flight records of every major airline to find a particular passenger? Every email you’ve ever written, every dick pic you sent your girlfriend, every drug you’ve ever b
een prescribed—”
“I get it, I get it,” I say. I’m not a complete amateur, the last twenty-four hours notwithstanding. “The CIA can finally compete with the NSA, using America’s most trusted brand names to do the spying for them.”
“Right,” he says, and to my shame, I feel like I just got an A from the teacher. “So you can see how they might be a little leery about having someone like you—a free agent, nobody watching you anymore, totally outside the chain of command—knowing all the same secrets that Preston knows. You can probably imagine the shitstorm that the Agency would have to endure if any of this got out. People are already paranoid enough about their privacy settings on Facebook. Imagine how the Fortune 500 would feel if they discovered that the company they hired to protect their data was actually sluicing everything over to the CIA? The blood would be knee-deep in the streets in Washington. Hell, someone might even have to quit and go get a high-paying job as a lobbyist. Much easier to have him kill you. Which is one reason they’ve got a squad of heavy hitters following that boy everywhere he goes.”
“But they didn’t tell him everything about me,” I say. “Preston’s men had no idea what they were up against.”
“Maybe they thought he didn’t need to know. You’re still considered a pretty big national secret yourself.”
“Not as valuable as Preston, apparently.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Cantrell says, and lets it hang there.
And here it is. Cantrell is not on the line with me out of charity. There’s always a motive. Nothing’s free.
“Something tells me you’re going to offer me a solution here.”
“Really? You must be psychic.”
God, I am getting tired of that joke. “I’ve heard you pitch before. I know the rhythms.”
“You’re right. I can make all your problems go away.”
“How?”
“Come back in.”
I’m actually stunned into silence. Times like this, I wish my talent worked over the phone.
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