Reeder leaned back farther. “You don’t scare me,” he said.
“Yes, I do. And if I don’t, you’re more of an idiot than I think you are.”
“I don’t think you entirely grasp where you are, Senator.”
“Leader Moncrief.”
“Haynes. This story hasn’t hit the media yet because we talked your baby boy Lance into keeping it quiet until we could talk to you.”
“Which brings me back to your last lie,” Haynes said. “What do you want?”
Reeder took his time gathering his thoughts. “Pretty much anything we want,” he said. “We don’t want you to do anything overt, nothing affirmative. Just stay out of our way.”
A punch to the throat would kill him, too. Haynes felt his fist tightening as that thought passed through his brain.
Yet he relaxed his posture. He’d fought too many battles over the decades without a major loss to concede defeat to this chicken-neck asshole. “Give me a second,” he said. He reached into his pocket and withdrew his cell phone again.
“Take your time,” Reeder said. His face showed equal parts confusion and discomfort.
Haynes pushed a speed dial and waited, confident that the party on the other end would pick up before the third ring. “Stella Pence,” a voice answered. She had been Haynes’s chief of staff for as long as he’d had a staff that needed a chief.
“Hi, Stella,” he said. “Mark Reeder invaded my space at Morton’s. Tony Darmond knows about Lance Reinhardt.”
“Oh, no. Really? I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said. “It had to happen sooner or later. Sorry to put you on this particular spot at so late an hour, but make the calls you need to make. We’re going nuclear.”
Stella fell silent on the other end of the phone. “Are you sure?” she said. “There’s no going back.”
Haynes let her words swirl in his head for a while, mixing with his fantasies of reducing Reeder to a lifeless lump of tissue. “You’ve got a point,” he said at length. “Can I ask you to hang around your phone for a few minutes? I’ll get back to you one way or the other.”
“Of course. Do you—”
He clicked off, slipped the phone back into his pocket, and smirked at Reeder, who he knew had heard his conversation.
“What?” Reeder said. “Clearly, I’m supposed to be even more afraid than I wasn’t before. You’ve got a nuclear plan.” He feigned a body-wide shiver. “Ooh, how scary.”
“Did you know that the First Lady used to be a terrorist?” Haynes asked. “She killed people on behalf of her old friends from Russia. She also had an affair with Douglas Winters. You remember him, right? He committed suicide a while back?” He used finger quotes as he leaned on those words.
Reeder’s steely façade twitched. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Haynes allowed himself a laugh. “Wow, that surprises me. Well, be sure to watch the morning news shows tomorrow. It’s a very cool story.” He looked up for Luis’s attention and beckoned him over. “I might even mention something about a story you’re going to leak in a foolish effort to discredit me. I’m sure that the thirty-year-old innocent sex story will resonate far louder than the president’s wife trying to topple the government.”
Luis arrived at the table.
Haynes pointed to Reeder with an open palm. “My pale, trembling friend here was hoping someone could escort him to the door.”
Luis looked terrified. He clearly had no idea what to say.
“Are you okay, Mark?” Haynes asked. “You don’t look well.” He made eye contact with Luis, and indicated with a twitch of his head that he should make himself scarce.
When they were alone, Reeder said, “If you had evidence, you would have revealed it by now.”
Haynes sat taller. “I’ve known about your boss’s transgressions since he first decided to transgress. I haven’t revealed what I know because I thought it would harm the country that I actually love. That’s hard for you guys to swallow, I know, but there it is.”
“Yet despite this patriotic fervor, if we threaten to come at you—”
“I will tear off your head and shit down your neck,” Haynes said. “Count on that.”
“We’ll take you down with us.”
“No, you won’t,” Haynes said. “Despite all the tummy rubs you give to your lapdogs in the press, they’ll tear you apart to get to the kind of raw meat I’m prepared to dangle. It’s not as if the stage hasn’t already been set. Remember those ‘disproven’ blog posts from a while ago? That fire went dark, but I bet it would be easy to rekindle.”
Reeder looked deflated—literally, like he needed air. “Is this really the way you want to play the game?”
Haynes laughed long and hard. “Really, Mark? That’s your question to me? Do you remember who invaded whose private space here?”
Haynes could almost hear the gears in Reeder’s head grinding for an exit strategy.
“Tell you what, Mark,” he said. “Why don’t you leave me alone?” He checked his watch. “I don’t want an answer from you now. I’ll give you till eight-thirty to say that you’re sorry and that I never have to worry about some bogus statutory rape charge. At eight thirty-one, I’m going to tell Stella to start calling newsrooms.”
Reeder sat there, looking dejected, as if the evening had gone any way but how he had anticipated, which was no doubt the case.
“This is your time to walk away,” Haynes said. He motioned for Luis to show Reeder the door.
The meal tasted even better than usual. In addition to being one of the final bastions that recognized a perfect Manhattan, Morton’s likewise understood the meaning of medium rare—it meant just north of rare, not just south of medium. When applied to a good cut of beef, the difference meant everything. Haynes received the phone call he’d been waiting for at eight-fifteen. The timing itself confirmed the value of the information he guarded. Nowhere else on the planet did the old saw, information is power, resonate louder.
With his belly full and his head appropriately buzzy, he stepped off the escalator into the lobby of the building that housed the restaurant, and from there, out into the stifling humidity of the evening. He turned right onto Connecticut Avenue and headed toward Farragut Square, beyond which another escalator would take him down to the subterranean bunker that was the Farragut West Metro station. His status as Senate minority leader qualified him for a car and a driver and a security detail, but he’d never wanted any of that. The voters he served were commuters themselves, and he’d hung at least two reelection bids on the fact that he endured what they endured every day. Oh, that the clueless, tone-deaf management structure of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority could find a way to make the nation’s second-busiest commuter rail run on time with equipment that worked. Haynes had actually asked the question, in session, why it was that Metro officials granted themselves raises when fifteen percent of their elevators and twenty percent of their escalators were out of service on any given day.
He’d been shamed into abandoning that theme when someone on Twitter made the news by asking why he should be paid at all, given the dysfunction of Congress. It was the kind of taunt that felt like it could have legs, so he abandoned the Metro theme before the media forced him into an unfortunate sound bite.
Now that the public was politically illiterate—where sound bites on the bedtime comedy shows were the largest source of news for the under-thirty crowd—there was no longer such a thing as an innocent slip of the tongue.
He was making this walk through Farragut Square later in the evening than he’d planned. The indigents and homeless were reappearing from their daytime hideouts and beginning to set up camp. At an intellectual, intuitive level, Haynes understood that these poor souls were largely harmless, but he also understood that a good many of them would be better off in a mental hospital than on a filthy tarp on the grass. They made him uncomfortable.
As he traveled the brick walkway, he
kept his hands in his pockets, his right fist wrapped around the grip of his Ruger LCP .380 pistol. He carried it in a pocket holster that always rested on his right thigh—literally inside the pocket of his suit pants. He never told anyone about it because it was none of their business, and he could get away with carrying it to work because members of Congress bypassed the magnetometers and security checkpoints. He harbored no fantasies about shooting it out with bad guys, but if an active shooter got loose inside the Capitol, or some nut job started shooting up a rally, he at least wanted a fighting chance if the murderer made eye contact.
Haynes knew the raggedy man up ahead was trouble the instant he rose from his bench. It was something in the way the man carried himself. His posture was too good for a homeless guy, his neck too athletic. His eyes too intense. And he was looking directly at Haynes. And he wasn’t dressed properly. No one needed a coat when it was this hot outside.
Haynes knew that he was about to get mugged. He stopped and set his feet for a fight.
The raggedy man clearly saw that Haynes had made him, and he sped up his pace to close the distance. He reminded Haynes of a torpedo in the water, its course set and its mission irreversible.
Haynes reacted without thinking. The LCP was out of his pocket and in his hand. His left hand joined his right for support, and he bent slightly into an isosceles stance, just as he’d been trained, and just as he’d practiced.
“Stop!” Haynes shouted. He was way too loud because he wanted witnesses to know that this was not a fight he’d picked. “I don’t want to hurt you!”
The man stopped forward progress, but his arms moved in a blur. A stubby sawed-off pistol-grip shotgun appeared from under his coat and he swung it up toward Haynes. The attacker said nothing.
Haynes pulled the trigger—there was no squeezing the little pistol’s heavy trigger—and the pistol bucked. Blinded by the muzzle flash, he fired again, two shots in two seconds. Homeless people and pedestrians screamed and scattered, but the raggedy man in his sights just stood there.
If the shotgun had gone off, Haynes hadn’t heard it—and he didn’t feel any holes in his gut. But he also saw no holes in his attacker. The man wobbled a bit, seeming to have difficulty raising his shotgun again.
Haynes considered taking another shot, but then the attacker listed to his left and fell like a tree onto the grass.
Consumed by decades-old training, Haynes dropped his aim to the low-ready position and scanned left and right, searching for additional threats. Seeing none, he pivoted a one-eighty and scanned for threats that might be behind him. In his immediate vicinity, he saw only people on the ground or running away. In the farther vicinity, a few clueless Metro riders continued their casual stroll in his direction.
No one else seemed to be posing a threat. Instinctively aware that he had only five shots left if bad things happened, he shifted the pistol to his left hand, and with his right, he pulled his cell phone from its pocket inside his jacket.
This was going to be a long night.
Chapter Five
Security Solutions, Inc., was more than an official cover for Jonathan’s covert activities—although it was certainly that. Renowned as a high-end private investigation firm, Security Solutions operated out of the top floor of a converted firehouse in Fisherman’s Cove, Virginia—along the Northern Neck of the Potomac River—that also served as Jonathan’s home, which took up the first two floors.
Security Solutions worked miracles for some of the biggest corporate names in the world, but for the most part, those investigations bored Jonathan to tears. As owner and CEO, he had to sign the checks and sit through the update meetings, but he lived for the juice of the 0300 missions—those jobs that separated good guys from the bad guys who had taken them hostage. These missions tested skills that he had learned at great taxpayer expense during his years in the United States Army and its most secret covert Special Operations unit. Once it was in your blood, it was there to stay.
The covert side of the business had no name, and did not officially exist, though given the talent he hired for the overt side, some of those brilliant minds had to wonder what went on beyond the perpetually guarded door to The Cave, the section of the office’s footprint where Jonathan’s and Boxers’ offices were located, along with that of Venice Alexander. (It’s pronounced Ven-EE-chay, by the way, and if you don’t have time in your schedule for a long lecture, you’d best not get it wrong a second time.) Nearly nailed as a felon in her younger years for causing mischief with her computer skills, Venice was now Jonathan’s hacker-in-chief, and she’d never let him down.
At Jonathan’s request, they’d gathered this morning in the War Room, the teak conference room within The Cave that Jonathan had stuffed with every techno-toy that Venice ever requested. Jonathan didn’t even try to understand what most of it did. Venice sat at what Jonathan called the captain’s station. Located at the far end of the rectangular conference table from the massive 106-inch projection screen, her spot was adorned with multiple keyboards, computers, and monitors—and maybe even a coffeemaker, as far as Jonathan knew. He might be the boss, but only a lunatic with a death wish would touch Venice’s toys.
The other seven seats around the table had their own computers and monitors, too, but only Venice could patch them to the main screen, which currently displayed two pictures of Dylan Nasbe. The one on the left showed him kitted up for duty in Afghanistan, his face all but obscured by an uncontrolled growth of beard, while the one on the right was his formal Army portrait—the one that would have been shown on the news if he’d been off’d in combat. Universal camouflage ACUs (Army Combat Uniforms), thick neck, square jaw, tan Rangers beret set just so.
“How come you guys never smile in these photos?” Venice asked.
“Because we’re killing machines,” Jonathan said without dropping a beat. “Machines don’t smile.”
“So, that explains Boxers,” she said.
“Hey,” Big Guy said. He’d been concentrating on stirring his coffee. “Is that really how you want this meeting to start?” He flashed a ridiculous, slightly frightening pantomime of a happy face. “Is that better?”
“You said something about invading South America again,” Venice said. “Is this gentleman the reason why?”
“He is.”
“Well, at a glance, I’ve got to tell you that he looks like he can fend pretty well for himself.”
“It’s not an oh-three hundred mission,” Jonathan said. He took ten minutes to fill her in on the details she’d missed yesterday afternoon.
While she listened, Venice pulled up a map of the world and made it spin to the Western Hemisphere, and from there zoomed in until Venezuela, Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba filled the screen. When Jonathan finished, she said, “So, let me get this straight. One guy is hiding out somewhere in this general area. What is that, only five percent of the world’s land mass?”
“I think that’s high,” Boxers said. “I say three percent.” This time, his smile was genuine.
“It makes the most sense that he would be in Venezuela,” Jonathan said. “I don’t see Boomer defecting to the Cubans, Jamaica is too full of tourists, and no one in their right mind would hole up in Haiti.”
“Plus, the Cubans are about to be our friends again,” Venice said.
“And there’s that,” Jonathan agreed.
“It’s easy to live like a king in Haiti,” Boxers said.
Jonathan coughed out a chuckle. They’d spent some time in Haiti a few years ago while in service to Uncle, and even the presidential palace was a dump in comparison to other such accommodations in the world—and that was before it was devastated by an earthquake. “I’m gonna trust my gut on this one,” he said. “He’s not in Cuba.”
“How are you going to narrow it down?” Venice asked. “I mean seriously, you can’t just go on a random search of the Caribbean.”
Jonathan had already thought this through overnight. “I need you to p
ull up what you can on Boomer’s family,” he said.
Venice’s jaw dropped. “Oh, my God, Dig. They’re going to freak out if they see you again.” Jonathan had rescued Christyne Nasbe and her son, Ryan, a while ago, in a particularly violent shootout. “Didn’t Dylan tell you himself that they were having a hard time adjusting?”
“Yes, he did,” Jonathan said. “But that was before he went rogue and started killing CIA assets. That’s kind of a rule changer.”
Venice’s shoulders sagged as the reality washed over her. “That poor boy,” she said. “How much can one family take?”
Jonathan bristled. “There’s a place up the hill that’s filled with kids who show an amazing ability to adapt to adversity,” he said. Resurrection House—the place up the hill—was a school Jonathan had founded anonymously as a residential facility for the children of incarcerated parents.
“Point taken.” A few more keystrokes. “She’s still in Fayetteville. She rents an apartment.” Fayetteville was the home of Fort Bragg, which was the home of the Unit headquarters.
“Is she working?”
Venice shot him a look. “Give me a minute.”
“Take your time,” Jonathan said. “I don’t mean to rush.”
She rattled off a few more keystrokes, and then punctuated her work with a triumphant finger-poke to the keyboard. “Time!” she said. She pointed to the big screen with her forehead. “There it is. She’s got a job at a lawyer’s office.”
“Really?” Boxers said. “She’s not with the Unit?” The elite Special Forces organizations had a long-standing tradition of protecting their own. Many an administrative job was held by a son or daughter or wife of a fallen or retired operator.
“Sad, isn’t it?” Venice said. “She moved off-post about three months ago. Ryan is in a public high school down there.”
Of all the news Jonathan had heard that contradicted his memories of Dylan Nasbe, this was the most damaging. It took a lot to reach the status of persona non grata within the Unit. The only cases he knew of personally were assholes who took secrets public—and with one notable exception, all of those assholes had been Navy SEALs.
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