The Operative

by Andrew Britton

  The men fell silent. The Asiatic man confirmed her guess with his look of open admiration.

  “What makes you say that?” he asked.

  “That’s a secret, I’m afraid,” she replied.

  A jet such as this one had a ceiling of 13,000 meters. They were leveling off at around 2,000 meters. That suggested a very short flight. There would be nothing in a Canadian city that Quebec would not provide, so she guessed they were headed to America. Only New York made sense within a two-hour radius.

  “Who are you people?” she asked.

  “Sorry. That, too, is need to know only,” the Asiatic man said.

  “Do you, in fact, have my daughter?”

  “We do,” the Asiatic man went on. “We needed a way to get your attention.”

  “For what?”

  “That’s the bad news,” he said, but he did not elaborate.

  She wanted to ask about Kamilah, how she was, when she might see her or even talk to her, but she doubted they would tell her anything. Information was power, and their body language told her that her little display had set them on guard. That was exactly what she wanted. A man on defense was easier to provoke.

  Yasmin regarded the African American. “What is your code name?” she asked.

  He just smirked.

  “Dr. Fed? FBI-Zee?”

  The man’s expression soured, and he moved forward suddenly, as though he intended to strike her. The Asiatic man held up a hand, palm out. The other man hesitated, then settled back into his seat.

  The leader turned to her. “Don’t talk.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because I’ll have them cut off your daughter’s finger and show it to you on a live feed,” he said and held up a phone.

  It was a Tac-Sat Elite. She was right. He was FBI.

  “Let me talk to her,” she said, pressing—not because she expected him to oblige, but because he would feel in control again if she asked.

  “Maybe ... when you show us you can behave,” he said as he slipped the phone back inside his jacket.

  Feigning obedience, the woman sat back. Her hands were still cuffed behind her, and she had to roll toward the window, keeping them as far to the right as she could, in order to sit comfortably. Even that was painful, however; they had not treated her gently back at the terminal, especially the two agents who had been unmasked. She had pulled every muscle in her back and shoulders trying to escape.

  Yasmin contemplated what might lie in store. It was unlikely they wanted her to go back to Pakistan, blend in, and start killing radical elements. All that would have taken was the right price and the release of her daughter. That would hardly be “bad news” to a mercenary.

  No. The scenario suggested a suicide mission, though even there she saw problems. Why go through the trouble of hijacking a skilled assassin, then waste her on a mission that anyone with a family could be forced to execute? Because she was a woman? That made no sense. Any whore could be paid to get close to someone in power. Any whore with a child could be coerced into killing him.

  And what of the other two Americans at the airport? Yasmin didn’t think they knew the identities of these three men. They had behaved as though the three were Pakistani security. The African American was right: the Canadians weren’t sophisticated enough to have made that level of deception necessary. Her abduction was a covert operation within the FBI that the other agents had not known about.

  All she knew for certain was that, before too much longer, she would have answers. And given that they still held her daughter, she probably wouldn’t like them.

  CHAPTER 2

  BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

  Allison Dearborn looked spellbound at the medusa as it parachuted through the large tank of the aquarium. She had just told Ryan Kealey she loved the colors of the jellyfish, and he said he understood. Then, suddenly, Kealey turned his back to the curved glass of the aquarium tank.

  “You okay?” she asked, her blue eyes following him.

  He nodded. She wasn’t convinced.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  “Just random—”

  “Ryan? Don’t try to smoke me.”

  He smirked. “It isn’t that... . I don’t know if I can explain,” he told her. “It might sound a little crazy.”

  Allison shrugged. “I’m a psychotherapist. Without craziness, I’d be unemployed.”

  His smile broadened, but he remained silent.

  “We’ve got nearly an hour before Julie’s dinner at the convention center.” She hooked her arm in his. “Come on. Give it a shot. I want to know.”

  Kealey patted her hand and glanced back at the tank. Allison took a moment to admire this man, who was not only a good friend but also an exemplary patient. Lean and of medium height, his dark hair nearly reaching his collar, Kealey had dressed for the banquet in a Caribbean-blue collared golf shirt, navy Dockers, and loafers. He looked good, and he looked healthy, relaxed. He was certainly in a much better place than when they had first met. There was a long way to go, but he was making progress.

  The creature was hovering now, barely drifting, its bell expanding and contracting with slow, rhythmical pulsations.

  “The medusa could be at rest right now or hunting its prey,” Kealey said. “You can’t tell the difference by looking at it.”

  “Fascinating and deflecting. What’s that got to do with—”

  “Bear with me,” he said.

  “Fine. How do you know this?”

  He raised the brochure he’d picked up at the exhibit’s Pier 4 entrance. “I read this while you were on the phone. It describes the creature’s survival mechanisms, like those venomous tentacles. It doesn’t wait for its enemies to mature. It eats their eggs. It’s a perfect biological machine. Tell me, how would you go about injecting humanity into something like that?”

  “I wouldn’t try. It’s not a human being.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “It’s the same with some people. People who watch other people and hover and kill for a living—they’re not quite human beings, either. I was thinking, How do you instill that, or if lost, how do you get that back?”

  “There are numerous approaches to rehabilitation—”

  “On the surface,” he said. “You acclimatize someone. Do you really change them?”

  “You mean brainwash?”

  “That’s a little harsher than I meant,” Kealey said. “You scrub out so much in the process. I’m thinking more along the lines of, how do you integrate new ideas with old to make a better person?”

  “That may be more a job for a priest than a shrink,” she said.

  “Maybe.” He smiled. “I told you it was kind of nutty.”

  “Only the part about equating yourself to a jellyfish,” she said. “That is what you were doing.”

  “Maybe,” he admitted.

  “Do you know what I was thinking? How its beautiful orange and violet stripes match my bracelets.”

  “Perfectly understandable.”

  “Why? Because it’s girl-brain stuff?”

  “No,” he replied. “Because you’ve never carried a gun.”

  His hand was still on hers. She gave it a loving squeeze. “Self-awareness is the cornerstone of psychological healing. I don’t think that’s crazy at all.”

  She looked back at the tank, caught a glimpse of herself in the glass. A tall, lithe blonde in her midthirties, she was dressed in her banquet attire, a brief, sleeveless black dress with box pleats, gold drop earrings, and the vintage Lucite bangles on her wrists. They looked good together, but that was as far as it went. She had met Kealey at a party thrown by Julie and her husband, Jon Harper, in D.C., and they’d gone on a long, rambling moonlit stroll that wound through Georgetown’s cobblestone streets to the Mall and, eventually, to his hotel. But their instant attraction had been counterbalanced by her strong professional ethic; Allison, a former CIA trauma counselor, had thought she was being introduced to a likely patient and had re
luctantly stayed in the lobby while he went up. For his part, Kealey later admitted he hadn’t been sure what to think when she left. He did say he was glad she took control. His romantic history was spotty at best, deadly at worst, and he might have scared her away before getting to know her as a dear and trusted friend.

  Allison continued to watch the medusa in the cool radiance of the hall. “So,” she said. “Flotation is groovy, huh?”

  He gave her a questioning glance.

  “A line from a Hendrix song,” she said.

  “I see. I was more of a Peter, Paul and Mary kind of guy.”

  “I didn’t know that about you.” She smiled. “Folksingers, eh?”

  “Apple pie and peace, that’s me,” Kealey said without a trace of irony. “I’m the product of their vision. Or, more accurately, trying to protect that vision.”

  Allison stared at him in silence. She recognized the monotone, the distant look. It was the hint of post-traumatic stress that many soldiers and virtually every field operative acquired at some point. Kealey was no exception. He had been relaxed, sociable since he returned from his last mission in Darfur and South Africa, which was anything but.

  Sent in as part of a “peacekeeping” tactic, Kealey had been on the ground to assist in ending the ten-year rebellion between the Eritrean government and a group of former eastern Sudan rebels that had united as the Eastern Front. Kealey had convinced both divisions that a peace treaty between them was their only option. Either that or get disintegrated, one way or another. But unfortunately, the deal had kept the Federal Alliance of Eastern Sudan, a fragment of the former eastern Sudan rebels, out of the picture, and Kealey feared a possible merging of the Justice and Equality Movement and the FAES, which would only prolong the peoples’ unremitting penury and extreme economic downturn due to an impossibly dense “national vision.” Not to mention the illicit guidance of their capital city, Khartoum, whose feelings toward its bordering African Nuba people was holocaustic.

  But America did it once, balanced peace, Kealey thought. Why not Sudan? Was our revolution, our own civil war so different? Yes. Because our leaders weren’t insane. America had erudite leaders then, on both sides of the battlefield. And this unmatchable lunacy is what’s causing the political collapse. The inescapable massacres. The contagious spread of demise. But learning that human nature is the ultimate technology, that will be the key to releasing their ancient manacles, and the beginning of their modernized advancement.

  When the deployment of a thousand South African troops to the western front of Sudan had been delayed due to elaborate passport and visa oversights—allowing the Janjaweed militia to raid a dozen more villages, killing hundreds more residents—Kealey was redeployed to inspect, scrutinize, and inform Washington about the sufficiency of the refugee camp outside the North Darfur city of Al-Fashir, which housed more than fifty thousand expatriates. Reporting first to the South African National Defence Force, to comply with their awkwardly strict regulations, Kealey observed firsthand the SANDF’s vast gaps of inexperience in dealing with the fallout of these radical wars, realizing further that foreign assistance was going to be insurmountably crucial to the survival of these people and their region. Being short on supplies and munitions notwithstanding, the numerous Islamic taboos and the South Africans’ critical views toward refugee women only increased tensions among gathering allies, which split the allied tribes into even more jagged, irreparable shards.

  But Kealey was not prepared to just sit on the bench and watch his side, the reasonable side, continually lose lives and ground. He had been trained to do far more than the SANDF even knew to ask for. In the mentally tormenting months he was out there, Kealey ran personally sanctioned special ops—planting perspicacious residents across enemy lines to filter critical intel back to the good guys, or vriende, as it had to be explained to the locals—and Kealey used the information to personally direct small bands of troops to several previously undisclosed mass graves containing nearly five thousand African corpses in various states of butchered decay.

  Despite Janjaweed leader Musa Hilal’s and President Omar al-Bashir’s repeated admissions that death was merely the path that war took, genocide was still the only word for it. And even the windblown sands couldn’t cover the killers’ scent. Kealey only wished he could follow the tracks all the way back to the maniacs’ doorsteps, kick in the doors, and do the same to their testicles. If they even had any.

  Those intense desires to right terrible wrongs didn’t diminish easily, not without help. Giving it “time” didn’t relieve a warrior’s hardened beliefs; it only made them swell like a corpse left neglected. Some sights, some smells, some instincts weren’t meant to go away that simply. If ever, at all.

  After returning home and renting a small house in Jesmond the previous winter, Kealey started to think about teaching again, about taking a break from conflict. Certainly, there was something about conveying critical information that was a passion of his. Besides letting him ventilate some of his painfully accrued wisdom, he liked the way people, especially students, reacted when their minds opened in new directions. Like the snaking vines that were steadily making their way up the sides of his rented quarters, he enjoyed watching them make progress, grow up, grow stronger.

  And dealing with unfamiliar people was constantly a challenge for Kealey. People always asked questions and made him reassess his easily slung answers into more exigent responses. In a classroom setting, despite his deeply sympathetic almond-shaped eyes, he couldn’t get away with just surveillance; he had to inspire students, push them, make them understand ideas outside their assorted upbringings. And students often required from their teachers what they could not get from their parents. They needed a scholar, someone who had all the answers, or knew how and where to find them quickly. Someone who could keep all the blank, staring faces separate but could still get them to work together, no matter what the course, no matter what the assignment. No matter what the mission.

  Unquestionably, there was concentrated pressure on being a teacher, and after considerable reflection, Kealey just wasn’t sure he was ready for that sort of pressure test yet. He had put the world’s humanity on the front line for years, and he didn’t think he could manage to “phone it in” for another 180-day school year, at least not as capably as the students really needed. Instead he booked some guest lectures on global issues at the University of Virginia. That was where he’d met Allison’s nineteen-year-old nephew Colin, who happened to attend school there.

  Kealey was better adjusted than most special agents, but there were times when the deaths he’d caused and the risks he’d taken gripped his soul. He had said it himself once: “My life is like the old joke about the waiter who serves a matador burger at the restaurant in Vera Cruz one day apologizing to the patron, saying, ‘Sometimes the bull wins.’ ”

  Thinking of Colin became an act of synchronicity. Allison reached into the small leather purse under her arm and pulled out her cell phone.

  “Hold on a sec,” she said. “I want to see what’s going on with Colin.”

  “Didn’t you just talk to him a half hour ago?”

  “Yes, but I want to check his posts.”

  “He’s blogging?”

  “Blogging? You’re so twenty-ten,” she said as she browsed down her queue of updates. “He’s tweeting from the convention center for his student newspaper. It’s called ambient journalism.”

  “I see. And how’s that different from reporting?”

  “Anyone can do it,” she said.

  “So the difference is it’s for amateurs.”

  “That’s harsh.”

  “Not at all,” Kealey said. “Where’s the editor, the veteran eyes?”

  “It’s the public, Ryan. The process has been democratized.”

  “Cheapened—no offense to Colin.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said confidently. “The good journalists get repeated hits. The bad ones are relegated to Facebook. The worst one
s are left to comment on what’s relegated to Facebook.”

  “No fair,” Kealey said. “You lost me at ‘repeated hits.’ ”

  “It’s no different than all the civilian eyes being used in the war on terror, watching for something unusual. Isn’t that how we recruit in Afghanistan, Iraq? Find the people who have a knack for observing, blending in, collecting images on cell phones?”

  “It’s a good thing I’m retired,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Why? Technology doesn’t scare you. You’ve used portable uplinks—”

  “It’s not the technology,” he said. “It’s the lack of privacy. The exponential noise. What spy would welcome that?”

  Allison smiled at something she read on her display. She started pecking out words of her own. “Sorry. As much as I’m enjoying your ‘poor us’ monologue, I have to respond to Col’s latest tweet.”

  “My point is made,” he said confidently.

  “Your point is beside the ... ,” she said, typing slowly with the sides of her thumbs, pausing once or twice to check for misspellings before she returned the phone to her purse. “Done,” she said.

  “What’s the word from the front?”

  “The red carpet is lined with local paparazzi and ready for the glitterati to begin arriving.”

  Kealey glanced at his wristwatch. “It’s a quarter to four,” he said. “Why don’t we take a leisurely walk back to the car, get my sports jacket and your high heels, and head over to the center?”

  “Sounds good.” She hooked her arm in Kealey’s and gave the creature in the tank a final look as they strolled away. The medusa tumbled through the water on an internal current, bumped up randomly, briefly, against another jellyfish, then spiraled away. It was a beautiful, functional life.

  But hollow, she thought. You could sum them up in a brochure. They weren’t conflicted, the way Ryan Kealey was, yearning for peace but missing the thrill of the hunt, walking chastely beside her yet caring deeply and wanting more.

  She hugged Kealey’s arm a little tighter, cherishing the prolonged contact, and quietly thanked God for the good that came with the bad. It didn’t make life easy, but they at least could actually hold each other.