The Operative

by Andrew Britton

  Police sergeant Dario Russo approached the driver’s side. It was a warm morning, and the van’s window was already down. There were two men inside, both African American. They looked hot and tired.

  “Good morning,” the fifteen-year veteran said to the driver. “May I have your registration and manifest please?”

  “Sure thing, Officer.”

  The driver, a powerfully built man in his late forties with short gray hair, pulled the documents from a folder in the glove compartment and handed them over. The other man, in his early forties, was in the passenger’s seat.

  “You’re not running the air-conditioning,” the officer observed.

  “We’re from Atlanta, sir,” the driver said with a smile. “This weather is what we call cool cucumbers.”

  “I see. Would you open the rear of the vehicle please?” the officer asked humorlessly as he scanned the papers.

  The driver got out and followed the sergeant. He was met by another officer in the rear, a young man whose name tag said HEMMINGS.

  “Good morning,” the driver said.

  “Good morning,” the young policeman said back.

  The driver selected the key from a ring in his pocket and opened the back door. Sergeant Russo handed the bill of lading to his companion and took the registration to the squad car that was parked just outside the barricade.

  “Most of these are going to our HQ,” the officer said, mildly surprised and slightly more alert.

  “Two blocks down.”

  “You’ve made the run before?”

  “Just once,” the driver said. “Last winter. After a snowstorm. But the tech upgrades had to get through.”

  “We appreciate it.”

  “Enough to let me stay parked here so I can just walk the stuff over?” the driver joked. “Those side streets are a bear.”

  “Sorry,” Hemmings replied.

  The officer leaned in and checked the marked contents against the bill of lading. The NYPD’s Counterterrorism Division was located in a secure block of office buildings, in a modern skyscraper. The bill of lading said the boxes were upgraded radiation detectors for the technology and construction section. That was the division responsible for the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative. Routes to the Wall Street area were already watched by streetlight-mounted boxes of technology designed to prevent even a well-shielded dirty bomb from being brought in. They were programmed to watch for radiation, as well, as the chemical signatures of containers in which radiological devices would be stored.

  Everything looked to be in order. It was impossible to dismantle all the contents of every vehicle, but officers used the quick check—as well as common sense and profiling—to ascertain whether cargo represented a plausible threat.

  The driver seemed relaxed. His accent seemed to fit where he said he was from. The van’s license checked out; the cargo looked right.

  The vehicle was allowed to go on its way.

  Contrary to his concerns, Absalom “Abbie” Bell found a parking spot on Exchange Plaza, a side street that bordered 55 Broadway, the police building. Two workers were sent down with dollies to accept the packages. A third came along to supervise. That left Bell with nothing to do. He offered to accompany his “copilot,” John Scroggins, on his delivery.

  “Why don’t you get us some lunch instead?” Scroggins suggested.

  “You ate in New Jersey.”

  “And I intend to eat again when we get out of this maze. Might as well have some decent food, instead of rest-stop junk. All the Pennsylvania roadside is bad, and it only gets worse as we head west.”

  Bell agreed that was a decent idea.

  While Bell set out toward Broadway in search of something that didn’t sound like a chain, Scroggins took his own dolly from the forward section of the van and loaded it with a pair of crates that had been tucked beneath a canvas tarp. The other men were too busy to pay him any attention.

  Scroggins easily off-loaded the crates one at a time, banded them to the dolly, and walked it west, to Trinity Place. It was amazing how the dolly seemed to have a will of its own due to the sloping, lopsided streets. They had seemed to the eye to be fairly level.

  Just like people, he thought and chuckled to himself as he looked at the people heading to work. You never know what’s inside.

  His eye caught the reflective glass of One World Trade to his right, the titan rising from the long-gone ruins of the World Trade Center. The tallest skyscraper in the hemisphere was a beautiful sight, its reflective glass skin aglow in the morning sun. He paused to take a cell phone picture. That site, too, seemed so level and firm. Looking at it, there was no way to know the trauma that probably still resonated in the granite below and the buildings all around it. Scroggins was looking forward to getting a better look at the site as they drove by on their way up the West Side as they started home. He only wished there were time to visit the memorial and museum. But staff drivers for Trask were constantly on the move, rarely having time to visit their families, let alone tour cities they visited.

  He continued along Trinity to Battery Place and made a right. The wind from the harbor carried the smell of the Atlantic Ocean. He drew it deep into his lungs and smiled. You just didn’t get that in Atlanta or New Mexico or Chicago or Colorado or any of the other places they drove. In the park, to his left, was The Sphere, the large metal globe that once stood in the plaza between the World Trade Center towers. Though dented and torn, the Fritz Koenig sculpture was still readily identifiable. It choked Scroggins up to see it there, standing behind an eternal flame that had been lit on the first anniversary of the attacks, tourists pausing to pay their respects or marvel at something that had survived the destruction.

  He continued west until he reached his destination. Arriving before the century-old white stone building, he stopped, pulled out his cell phone, and called a number he had been given.

  “Dr. Gillani?”

  “It is.”

  “John Scroggins from Trask Industries,” he told her. “I have a pair of crates for you.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I will send someone.”

  “Yes, ma’am. His name will be?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “For security. Who am I meeting?”

  “Oh. Chuck Lancaster.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Scroggins folded away the phone and stood in the warm sunshine. It had been a long, nonstop drive, and as always, it felt good to have arrived. He felt as though he and Bell had earned their pay. Their coworkers at Trask did not refer to what he did as blue collar. So many of them were software geeks that they described his work as “analog labor.” He actually liked the sound of that. It was like LPs and movie film. He liked them, too. They were old but real.

  He was thinking that thought just as his eyes wandered across the park to the harbor, where they settled on the Statue of Liberty. She had been whited out by the storm the last time they were here. It had been over twenty years since he’d seen the old analog girl.

  “Nice to see you’re still here,” he said from the heart. He took another picture to show his wife. Eva had never been out of Georgia. If he was analog, she was just ... log. Like a native who loved her ancient village and didn’t see any good reason to leave it. She said she was happy to live through him.

  “Mr. Scroggins?”

  The deliveryman turned as a burly man in a white lab coat came down the front steps.

  “That’s me,” Scroggins said.

  “I’m Chuck Lancaster,” the man said, flipping out a college ID.

  “Yes, you are,” Scroggins said with a smile.

  The young man showed him to the small service elevator just to the west of the door. They loaded the crates together.

  “Not as heavy as they look,” Scroggins said.

  The man in the white coat was silent. Years of sitting in a truck cab had made Scroggins comfortable with not talking. But that wasn’t the same as being antisocial. Scroggins believed in
always making an effort.

  “Some kind of equipment, but you’d never guess it,” the deliveryman said amiably. “Most of that stuff is transistorized and microchipped. Not like the brutes I used to handle for TI.”

  “I’ll take it from here,” the big man said.

  So that’s how it is gonna be, Scroggins thought. Okay. You tried.

  “Great. All you need to do is sign, please.” Scroggins took an electronic device from a loop on his belt. He held it out.

  The man looked down at the tiny screen. “What do I do?”

  “Thumbprint anywhere on the monitor,” Scroggins said. “That way, if it doesn’t get where it’s supposed to, we know who to look for.”

  He had said it as a joke, but he wasn’t kidding. The other man didn’t laugh. He just pressed his thumb to the screen, immediately heard a little chime, and stood next to a metal door, the service elevator access.

  Ten minutes later, after Scroggins used his Minotaur phone to text his progress to dispatch—and received the go-ahead to proceed—he and Bell were back on the road, heading north past the World Trade Center site. Scroggins got only a glimpse as they swiftly headed uptown while the heavy commuter traffic crawled downtown to his left. The west side of the great tower, away from the sun, was comparatively dark and silent. It looked like a monument making the site seem mute and sacred. It choked him up, and he had to look away.

  The drivers were actually saner here than they were in Atlanta. He looked forward to being away from all that. They were headed west now, to New Mexico. Neither he nor Bell had been told why. Presumably to pick something up, since the van was empty. It didn’t matter to him. They had a couple thousand miles of open road, his iPod was loaded with Dixieland jazz, and a generous expense account had been allotted for food and lodging. Because the van was empty, they wouldn’t actually have to sleep in it, as they did on many trips.

  Scroggins was still reflecting on the things he’d just seen, on how cooperative and accommodating the police had been. Not so much that Chuck Lancaster, but he was young. He wouldn’t have remembered. A lot of people said that it was 2001 that changed New Yorkers, made them more aware of their surroundings but also of their neighbors. Maybe that was true, the same way that his father said World War II brought everyone together.

  “Especially when they realized that Coloreds could fight for our country as well as everyone else,” Pop had said.

  John Scroggins found it sad that brotherhood should come at such a price. Though it was a good thing to have, he mouthed a little prayer that nothing like those tragedies happened again.

  Chuck Lancaster did not go immediately to the penthouse. He went to the parking garage, where he loaded one of the crates in the trunk of a beaten-up 2005 BMW. There was a rusted dolly already in the trunk. He had to shuffle the latter around to make room. It was not a car anyone was likely to steal. Even if they wanted to, the spark plugs had been removed. They were upstairs and would be restored at the proper time.

  As soon as the crate was loaded, the man went back to the elevator and took the other crate to the penthouse. He was still thinking about his thumbprint and understood why the doc had made sure he did not have a criminal record before hiring him. She wouldn’t want an ex-con signing for equipment being used for experiments in mind control.

  Not that an ex-con would know what to do with that equipment, the big man thought. He was an undergraduate psych student at Columbia. He had been working with Dr. Gillani for three months, watching her and Dr. Samson with intense interest, and he still didn’t know what to do with it.

  But he was learning. That was why he worked here. He hoped he would be able to continue when the semester started again. Dr. Gillani had said the crate he had just off-loaded was going to a new facility up the river. If it wasn’t too far out of town, he would still be able to commute from the university.

  That was still months away, though. No need to worry about it now. He was eager to get back and see how Princess Yasmin fared in the next phase of her evolution.

  Dr. Gillani called Alex Hunt to let him know that the packages had arrived. She asked again what they were.

  “Need to know,” he told her again.

  The agent had been asleep in his Hell’s Kitchen apartment, exhausted by the previous day’s events and the long night of answering questions from the police and his own people. The police seemed satisfied that he had left Franklin May standing on a street corner and had gone right back to Dr. Gillani’s lab. He couldn’t tell what his own boss thought. The assistant director in charge, Samantha Lennon had been pulled from a squash tournament to deal with the situation. She had always been suspicious of Hunt because he did not seem to be after her job. Paranoia was a funny thing. The truth was, he liked having all access to information and resources without the responsibility of running the field office.

  Hunt showered and grabbed a coffee at the corner of Forty-Fifth and Eighth Avenue before heading to the subway. He took the One train downtown, emerging at Rector Street and walking to the lab.

  He felt almost guilty about how easily the packages had got into Manhattan. The Trask name, an oblivious and innocent driver, cargo bound for the NYPD. It guaranteed there would be sharp scrutiny of the handiest packages, and an assumption that the rest were more of the same. Why wouldn’t they be?

  Hunt crossed the narrow footbridge and passed the site where he had left Franklin May. The area was still marked off with yellow police tape, and an officer was standing guard. Employees were entering the building, some clearly unaware of what had happened right outside their door.

  Hunt didn’t smile. He didn’t feel anything. He had done what had to be done.

  And in two days, after nearly two years of groundwork, after a nearly flawless execution in Baltimore, he would finally finish the job.

  So the larger mission could begin.

  CHAPTER 20

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Kealey could have slept for a month. He woke with the alarm, moving to the bathroom before he was really awake, giving himself the luxury of a few seconds to remember why he was up and what he was supposed to be doing. At least he knew his way around the bedroom in the dark. Kealey had slept in so many beds over the years that that in itself was a small, happy miracle.

  In fact, he thought as he snapped on the bathroom light, the time he’d spent in this rented house might be the longest he’d stayed put since he was a kid.

  Rented house, he thought. Not a rented home. His life had not wanted for excitement, for travel—often to places most people had never heard of—and even for romance. But home was something that had eluded him. The desk jockeys, the informants, even the politicians he had known all seemed to envy him his freedom. CIA field guys listened a lot more than they divulged, and Kealey wasn’t a talker to begin with. So he never told them, told anyone except Allison, how much he missed having anything approaching roots.

  “Your stability is all self-generated,” she had told him in one of their recent therapy sessions.

  She was right. But what he told her, half joking, was also true: “Boy howdy,” he’d said, “bootstrapping does wear you down.”

  Hot water was waiting for Kealey after his shower and shave. He had smelled nothing brewing and swore when he saw it. He had set the Krups timer the night before but had forgotten to put coffee in the filter. So he had Lipton to go. It failed to satisfy, but Kealey got the caffeine kick start he needed. He grabbed the ticket he’d printed out and the overnight bag he’d also packed the previous night. He hoped he hadn’t forgotten to put anything important in it. Like his Glock, hidden in a leather toiletries bag. That was the real reason he preferred to travel by train. It was the only mode of public transportation that was relatively unchanged since it was invented: schedules were an approximation and security was nonexistent. There were no bag checks, and the gun stayed with him.

  The drive to Union Station took a little longer than he’d expected, with checkpoints and roadblocks still in
effect. It would be that way for at least a week, until Homeland Security had determined there were no in-motion or pending threats against the nation’s capital. Kealey wasn’t surprised to see them, to have to show his license and registration to beat cops; he’d simply forgotten.

  Sometimes you get so deep into something, you forget what it does to the real world, he thought as he finally reached the station.

  Long-term parking was at 50 Massachusetts Avenue, NE. It cost twenty dollars a day and wasn’t really worth it. But since Andrews was paying, Kealey indulged. The station’s beautifully refurbished lobby was cavernously empty. Anyone who was getting out of the city had done so the night before; anyone who was already out wasn’t coming back.

  Kealey checked the arrival/departure board, noted his track, and went to it. The IA man he was traveling with was already there, waiting at the open gate. He was dressed in a black raincoat and a dusty, badly rumpled suit. Kealey had never met Reed Bishop, but he knew him at a glance.

  He was a man who looked like he’d just lost his daughter.

  Kealey didn’t go directly over. He stopped at a coffee shop that was just opening, waited to go in, then got himself a tall black hazelnut and a couple of biscotti. He washed the tea taste from his mouth, then walked over to the gate.

  “Reed?” he asked.

  The man was staring at a color tablet. Kealey caught a glance before Bishop clicked it off. He was reading the Christian Science Monitor. Kealey knew the paper well. More than a few times he’d tucked himself in a corner of one of their reading rooms around the globe. For some reason, the kind of people who ended up searching for CIA agents never thought to look there. Maybe they thought it was a temple, a sanctuary. Or maybe they thought Company men couldn’t read.

  A pair of heavily lidded red eyes looked up. They were set in a pale face that seemed even whiter because the owner hadn’t shaved. “Yes, I’m Reed,” the man said numbly. “Mr. Kealey?”

  “Ryan.” He set the bag of biscotti on his carry-on, offered his free hand. Bishop took it mechanically. “Can I get you a coffee? You look like you could use one.”