Sleeping Dogs

by Tony Vanderwarker

  “You’ve made your position clear.”

  “You bet your ass on that,” she says, with a final huff.

  The roadway flies by under the hood of Howie’s Accord until Sharon breaks the silence, “By the way, I need some stuff—toiletries, makeup.”

  “The first chance we get. Anything else?”

  Sharon shakes her head, and then shoots him a quick look that seems a bit conciliatory, as if the storm has passed.

  “So what do you do when you’re not playing nurse?” Howie asks.

  “See friends, read and watch football every chance I get.”

  “Don’t say?”

  “I told you—my dad was a high school coach. Won the state championship three years in a row.”

  “What’s he doing now?”

  “Both my parents were both killed seven years ago in an accident.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “They named the field after him, Thorsen Field.”

  “Must make you proud.”

  “I go to all the games, sit in the VIP section, it’s nice.”

  “I hope you don’t have a game this weekend.”

  “Season’s over. Just as well, crappy team this year. Rebuilding time. So how many points did you kick?”

  “Came close to breaking eighty, but the big deal was I got the winning field goal in our last game against a nationally ranked team.”

  “No kidding?”

  “People still talk about it.”

  “Not much else to talk about in those early years of Virginia football.”

  “The program’s getting hot now.”

  “Tell me about it. New coach, new stadium.”

  Sharon stops, looks out the window and then turns back to Howie. “Hey, I was a little harsh back there, the Crusader Rabbit business was out of line.”

  “Not a problem. It’s not something I take personally,” Howie says, lying through his teeth.

  “I do appreciate your help, everything you’ve done, coming up here, helping me get him out of there—I want you to know that.”

  She’s relieved to have staked out her turf in no uncertain terms. Now he knows she won’t hesitate to step on his toes or even pull the rug the minute she feels he is taking advantage of her patient. She curls her legs up on the seat and crosses her arms.

  Alone in a car fleeing from some shadowy Pentagon force in the middle of the night with a man she’s known for barely five hours, she’s determined to make it clear she’s ready for anything. But the last thing she wants him to know is that she’s scared to death.

  The two unlikely allies silently stare out the window at the dark walls of trees rushing by on either side of them, a few patchy clouds in the sky overhead, only an occasional vehicle overtaking them.

  Both know their first sparring match now was played to a draw. But Howie Collyer and Sharon Thorsen also know there will be more to come. For both have realized that each is stubborn as the day is long.

  10

  Georgetown, early Saturday morning

  Rubbing his eyes, Winn Straub wobbles into the kitchen in his bathrobe and slippers to find the lights blazing. His wife must have fallen asleep in front of the TV and forgotten to turn them off. He clicks the switch and flips open the top of the coffeemaker. Following his morning ritual, he opens the cabinet, takes out a paper filter and fits it into the top, carefully spoons grounds into the filter, then touches the space bar on his laptop that’s sitting alongside. As he fills the pot with water, the computer’s hard drive whirs and the screen blinks to life.

  Straub is accustomed to getting up at five. It’s before noon in most European capitals and the end of the day in the Far East, a good time to check to see if any new crises are brewing. As he’s putting the pot together, he pauses when he notices a flagged email.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Straub says out loud, leaning toward the screen when he sees the name. Starting the coffeemaker, he opens the email. It has been six months since he’s heard from his college roommate.

  Winn hoped that retirement would mellow Howie, but as he reads the message, he knows Howie’s back to his old tricks.

  Winn, I’m onto something that could turn out to be big. Won’t know for a while but I’m going to see where it takes me. But I might step on some toes along the way and need your help.

  Not that Howie’s cause wasn’t worthy of concern, Straub has recognized for years that unrecovered nuclear weapons was a Cold War loose end the Pentagon had swept under the rug. And in the wake of 9/11, to anyone aware of the bombs’ existence, the thought of terrorists fishing a nuke out of the water and detonating it was distressing. Yet conventional wisdom put the threat of terrorists using stolen or black market nuclear materials or devices way above the probability of attempting to recover one of the missing weapons. As far as Straub knew, there wasn’t a single contingency plan covering lost nukes in any federal agency. Buried in mud or half-covered with coral in unknown or highly classified locations, they were off everyone’s radar. The only danger lost nukes posed was in his college roommate’s mind.

  Straub pours himself a cup of coffee and carries the laptop over to the island. He begins typing,

  Howie, I hope you’re not messing around with some sensitive Pentagon program. I suggest you get your butt back to Charlottesville and bury your nose in a good book, play some golf, take that nice wife of yours out to dinner and keep yourself out of trouble. Best, Winn

  Straub rereads his email. He knows Howie has never paid any attention to advice—even from an old friend. So he types in the link to a more secure email server that only Straub and the agents under his control have access to. For the time being, it will give Howie added cover.

  He takes a sip of coffee, listening to the first plane of the day roaring down its glidepath into Reagan. Back in his heyday, he skulked around Eastern European cities, Budapest and Bucharest, Sofia and Vienna, and developed a reputation as a master schemer who took deceit and deception to new levels.

  He puts down his cup. Out in the garden, a robin that forgot to head south perches on the edge of the birdbath.

  As much as he tries to chase the thought from his mind, it keeps returning, popping back up, and to Straub’s surprise, gaining plausibility and attracting his interest each time it presents itself. If Howie is poking around in the dark recesses where the Pentagon’s secrets are hidden, leaving him out there might pay off. Maybe he’ll provoke the Pentagon into doing something rash—making some bonehead move I can capitalize on. And the risks could be minimized if the circle of people who know what Howie’s up to can be kept tight. The one thing he can count on is that the intelligence community shares information about as freely as they share budgets. Even within individual agencies, secrecy is paramount and information is so jealously guarded that one hand often has no idea of what the other’s doing. If he can stay behind the scenes, giving Howie cover and feeding him information, the upside could be huge.

  Dicey game, using his college roommate as a decoy for the Pentagon—but to Straub, dicey was the only game in town.

  An hour later, a hundred miles south in Charlottesville, Sylvie and her daughter Grace are sitting in the kitchen over their third cup of coffee. Since her husband left for Pittsburgh, Sylvie has been a wreck. Yesterday they visited his parents in the nursing home on the other side of town. Grace thought it would be a good distraction. But the visit only added to her mother’s anxiety.

  “I thought they looked well,” Sylvie frowns to Grace as they rehash the visit to the life care facility. “But they both seemed upset Howie didn’t visit.”

  “You’re the one who’s upset, Mother.”

  “I have a sixth sense about these kind of things.”

  “Look, Dad’s a big boy and even though he goes off half-cocked sometimes, his head is on straight enough to keep himself out of trouble,” Grace says.

  “He could have called,” Sylvie repeats for the umpteenth time. “He didn’t call at all yesterday and he always does when
he’s away. I’m worried that those people from the Pentagon are after him.”

  “That’s cuckoo, Mother. Those people from the Pentagon—do you know how nuts that sounds?”

  “If Howie’s after some bomb it isn’t.”

  “Wait a minute here, let’s not let our imagination run away with our good sense. We don’t really know if there are any lost bombs. The whole thing could be a figment of his imagination. We’ve always said that. And second, this whole conspiracy deal at the Pentagon, that’s totally wacky if you ask me.”

  “I just wish he hadn’t gone up there.”

  “He’s been gone for thirty-six hours, you know how he loses track of time.” Grace has an idea. “Did you look at your email? Maybe he sent you an email.”

  “I’ve checked it five times already.”

  “When did you do it last?”

  “I don’t know, two hours ago.”

  “It’s worth looking again,” Grace mumbles, walking over to the computer in the home office Sylvie has set up for herself on one wall of the living room.

  “If you’d heard what your father told me about that phone call he got during dinner, you wouldn’t think I’m crazy.”

  “All that stuff about a pilot hidden away in a VA hospital starting to blab about a lost bomb is just too far out for me. Aha! I told you, here’s an email from The Boot himself. Sent an hour ago.”

  Sylvie trips over a chair leg rushing to the computer. “What does it say? Is he okay?”

  “You read it . . .”

  Sylvie peers over her daughter’s shoulder as she reads the email, “You’re right,” she says. “He does sound okay. So his cell is on the fritz, I guess that’s why he’s emailing. He’s been having trouble with it for a while.”

  “See? I told you. There it is in black and white. Now don’t you feel stupid having gotten yourself all worked up? Dad’s fine. His phone’s fried, that’s all. It says right here, ‘Everything’s fine . . .’ and he might have to be up there a few more days. So what’s the big deal?”

  Sylvie stands at the computer reading the email for the third time. “I guess he is all right. He’s probably just preoccupied with something. You know how he can go off on a tangent.”

  “Tell me about it,” Grace says, rolling her eyes.

  No point in alarming Grace, but Sylvie Collyer is certain something is amiss. Sure, he sounds fine. But there’s some other reason he’s emailing. If his phone wasn’t working, he could have used a pay phone. And Sylvie has sent enough emails to notice that there’s no sending address, as if the email magically came from out of the ether. She wonders if Winn Straub is involved. Has he given Howie some kind of cover? On one hand she’s relieved, on the other she’s scared to death. It isn’t good to mess with them.

  Them. As overdramatic as it sounds, Sylvie Collyer knows they exist. Ghost programs run by the faceless and nameless operating by unpublished rules to achieve unknown ends. A woman she played tennis with whose husband worked at the Pentagon—he made a stink about something that made all the papers. And all of a sudden the family moved away. Up and vanished. Happened every once in a while. Mysterious car accidents. Hunting mishaps. Always talk about large amounts of money. Stories suggesting sinister forces lurking behind veils of secrecy invisibly acting in the name of national security.

  “Mother, is something the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Worse,” Sylvie says.

  “But Dad sounds great. I don’t see what you’re fretting about.”

  Sylvie fakes a smile. “Grace, you know me, I’m just a worrier at heart.”

  11

  Pentagon, Saturday morning

  That morning, Wishnap is thrilled to see a message come in with a routing code he doesn’t recognize. Special codes are kept in a looseleaf notebook stored in the safe in the large file room off the chief of staff’s office, which means he can spend some time chatting up the chief’s bevy of secretaries. Hours cooped up in a cubicle staring at a screen leave him craving human contact.

  Sent from a Veterans Administration hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the email is directed to Vector Eleven. He guesses Vector Eleven is a Special Access Program requiring special security clearance. SAP or black program participants are never directly identified and their agendas are classified Polo Step, a level above Top Secret—the addresses on incoming mail are the only indications of their existence. Even the addresses themselves are Polo Step. Vector Eleven would have a seven, eight or nine digit routing designation in the notebook, which, when he punched it in, would electronically sort the message directly to those individuals in Vector Eleven without revealing their names.

  In his three months of duty in the Pentagon, he has been surprised at the number of black programs, many with ominous-sounding names— Orange Talon, Rising Blade, Domino Twist—names that tantalize with implications of mysterious and sinister activities but ultimately leave the guesser stymied.

  Wishnap had hoped a senior staff assignment in Washington would burnish his resume. But after three months, he’s already itching to get back into the field. After 9/11 the Pentagon is a 24-7 operation, the place works around the clock. Wishnap finds himself working weekends and since the Pentagon is largely staffed with officers—the building is literally crawling with colonels—being at the bottom of the pecking order effectively reduced him to a pencil pusher with a high security clearance.

  To add insult to injury, sitting at a computer terminal receiving information and routing it to the proper channels is clerical work. The Army didn’t hand out Purple Hearts for carpal tunnel syndrome. Sure he works in a SCIF, called a “skiff” around the Pentagon, a Secure Compartmented Information Facility, and he has a top-secret security clearance, but all the impressive keypads on the doors, armed guards at the entrance and Secure Telephone Units on the desks can’t make up for the fact that he is a glorified clerk.

  Commuting from his tiny apartment in Fairfax with the hordes of other Pentagon workers, he stands in slug lines waiting for a ride-share then is packed in like a sardine for the half-hour ride to the massive structure known as the Building or the Squirrel Cage—since from an aerial perspective that’s exactly what it looks like—the nerve center of the American military machine.

  The chief of staff’s office is a five-minute walk down the D ring into the walkway to E. As a young officer, the sweep of the five-ring, five-spoked Pentagon with its endless corridors, colorful displays of maps and insignia and flag officers loaded with stars around every corner used to be impressive. Now used to it, it feels more like Wishnap’s old township high school back in Illinois, characterless and institutional, one corridor the same as every other, long stripes of overhead fluorescents reflecting in the gleaming floors, everything polished within an inch of its life.

  A slender and attractive secretary named Gretchen, high heels, hair pulled back, is standing at the watercooler reading Vogue. The chief likes his secretaries trim and athletic, and each day his staff starts with a 5:30 workout at the POAC, the Pentagon athletic club. She’s an up-and- comer, rumor has it she’s slated for a slot at the White House.

  “Are you slumming, Colonel?” Gretchen asks as he pauses on his way to the safe. “Don’t see you often in this area.”

  Wishnap holds up the envelope containing the document, “Got a Polo Step communication and I need a routing code.”

  “Polo Step, huh? How does it feel to be in the inner circle?”

  “I’m afraid I’m just a messenger.”

  “You know what they say about messengers,” she winks.

  Their conversation is interrupted by a flurry of activity. The chief of staff, General Nerstand, is on the move and it isn’t healthy for the career of an aspiring Army officer to be seen standing around the watercooler gossiping with one of the general’s shapely young secretaries.

  “See you, Gretchen,” Wishnap says, scurrying off in the direction of the file room before the flying wedge of brownnosers surrounding the s
enior officer in the United States Army sweeps through the area.

  Opening the safe, he takes out the codebook, “Vector Eleven,” he wonders as his index finger pages down the sheet in the notebook and settles on the organization. “Wonder what in the hell Vector Eleven does?”

  Lieutenant General Greg Watt is pissed, really pissed. It’s Saturday and he’s sitting at his desk in the Pentagon instead of in the VIP box at Byrd Stadium watching the Terps play Clemson. Plus, the situation in Pittsburgh has gone from bad to worse. Wednesday, Watt was alerted that a nurse at the VA hospital was sniffing around a patient, a man Vector Eleven had arranged to be committed three years ago. For some reason, she had altered his meds.

  Watt scanned the man’s file and knew he had to act. Yesterday, he’d ordered the patient’s former dosage reinstated, but the damage had been done. The nurse had become more suspicious. So the order went out to raise the dose and eliminate the problem.

  Too late, dammit all to hell, Watt snorts, slamming the email down on his desk.

  Watt’s heavily lidded eyes were the first to see the email to Vector Eleven from Pittsburgh. At 2135 hours, a VA nurse, Sharon Thorsen, abducted Risstup from the hospital, escaping by drugging a member of the security detail. The only thing Watt can figure out is that she must have seen the reinstatement order and was trying to protect him. But why? Out of the goodness of her heart? Or does she have another agenda— maybe one backed by the CIA or another agency hoping to dig up some dirt on the Defense Department?

  Watt checks his watch. Almost 1600 hours. In a few minutes, the video from the security cameras will be transmitted.

  Turning the key to activate his secure phone, Watt grumbles to the lieutenant outside his office, “Any news from the VA hospital?”

  “They were finishing encoding it a few minutes ago, sir,” his aide tells him. “It should be coming in any moment.”

  “I’ll keep an eye out,” Watt says.