Which was impossible. All the Army knew how to do was bat eyes.
The new post-9/11 policy of data sharing between agencies was extremely helpful to Frank on this score. It had enabled him to keep tabs on Jaime Richards since her return, to at least know where she was and what she was up to. Her file said she was five foot seven; from his interview with her four years ago, he knew she had piercing green eyes that saw straight through him, that seemed able to read his thoughts. At least it felt that way at the time. Obviously, she hadn’t read them well enough.
Frank pulled out her file and looked at the current photo. Her blond hair was a shade lighter, undoubtedly bleached by the desert sun. She was still in good shape, and had even acquired some pleasing curves. Frank had buffed up in Tunisia; now his biceps and quads were like iron. He laughed softly. Jaime Richards and Frank McMillan, versions 2.0.
According to Frank’s information, Richards had missed a promotion board while she was away. At the next board, later this month, her Officer Record Brief—which listed where and when every officer was assigned—claimed that for those three years she was attached to the Office of the Chief of Chaplains in D.C. Frank understood that the Army wouldn’t keep her listed as in Iraq—why give someone three years of combat pay when they didn’t have to? But there was no explanatory note that she was kidnapped, only that she was on “duty elsewhere.” And her personnel microfiche had three single pages labeled “classified” where evaluation reports should be.
What did that mean? In this particular case, what the hell did that mean?
Where had Jaime Richards been? And what did it have to do with Eden and the six jewels?
If there was a chance—the smallest chance—that she’d been in Eden, that she knew about Eden, that she could get there again, Frank had to find out.
From Tunisia, all he’d really been able to do was hear (although several months after the fact) that she’d reappeared and be kept apprised of her location. Now he was back, he was in Geneva, in a situation where he had mobility. He had been waiting for something to turn up, for another ticket into the mystery that was Eden.
This box was it. It had the key jewels, the jewels that to those in the know, signalled “Eden.”
Did it have a direct connection to Jaime Richards? There was one way to find out. He’d follow the box, and see who else was following it, too.
He would also keep very close watch on Jaime Richards.
He already had a man on it. His last name was Maynard and he was undercover in Iraq as a Department of the Army civilian working for Army Material Command.
Frank took out his BlackBerry and e-mailed him: Anything to report?
The response took only two minutes: Nothing. She spends most of her time in her office counseling, working in their operations center, or visiting soldiers in the hospital. Although she won’t stay put. I spent Christmas Eve dodging mortars because she was climbing frigging guard towers to hang out with the guards. However, no apparent nonmilitary activity. No contact with anyone of interest. She’s going on mid-tour leave tomorrow. Good riddance. Let our guy in Germany sit outside her place.
Frank stared at the words. Just stared at them.
The box had appeared, and Richards was on the move.
Was the timing coincidence? Or could the eBay listing and the chaplain’s leave be connected?
Frank’s response to Maynard was flagged as urgent: Wherever she’s going, you’re going, too. See to it.
It was all he could do not to add: you moron.
Ah. Frank was back, and the hunt was on.
WEDNESDAY
January 24, 2007, 12:10 a.m.
(3 days, 11 hours, 20 minutes until end of auction
Logistics Support Area Anaconda
Balad, Iraq
* * *
Jaime Richards had twenty hours. Twenty hours to fly from Balad, Iraq, to Tallil—make a pickup—and continue on to Ali Ah Salem, Kuwait; Frankfurt, Germany; and deliver her package safely in Switzerland.
She couldn’t even count the number of things that could go wrong. She was officially taking her mid-tour leave, and soldiers knew the plane they were on to start the journey out of Iraq could leave today, tomorrow, or, God forbid, a week from today. Or they could get stuck in Kuwait. Last time Jaime’s boss had flown out on leave, the emir of Kuwait died, and the whole country—including the airfields—had shut down for three days.
Jaime had twenty hours.
She was packing her bags in the trailer that served as her hooch when she got a call. A COSCOM (Corps Support Command) soldier from one of her subordinate units was critically injured and was being rushed into surgery. It was a classic chaplain’s dilemma. She needed to continue packing, there was no way she could miss her flight, and she desperately needed a couple of hours of sleep before the start of her new mission.
But there was a boy, and he was badly hurt.
To her mind, there really was no choice.
She headed for the operating room in the series of large interconnected tents that comprised the hospital, to observe the surgery and pray for the young soldier while the neurosurgeon worked on his damaged skull, which had been split wide open when the Humvee tire he was inflating exploded in his face. The rim had caught him on the forehead, right at the hairline about two inches above his eyes.
“Michael, are you with us?” Once the surgery was complete and Jaime knew she wouldn’t get in anyone’s way, she stepped up to the patient’s side.
He had begun to stir, and squeezed Jaime’s hand, on which she wore a disposable purple latex glove. She was amazed that someone could wake up and be aware of his surroundings after having his brain exposed only minutes before.
The young man was lucky to be alive, and even luckier that his skull had taken most of the impact, protecting the brain housed within.
“Doc,” she said over her shoulder to a man who was making notes on the patient’s clipboard. “That wire mesh you put in his forehead molds perfectly. You can hardly tell this guy had a piece of his skull broken out.”
“I told you,” he responded. “I’m the best.”
She could see him smile beneath his mask but knew that he wasn’t kidding.
If I ever need neurosurgery, she thought, I want someone with that kind of confidence working on me!
Still in the maroon scrubs she had donned to watch the procedure, she followed the gurney as they wheeled the young man back to the ICU for observation during his first hours of recovery. If they were certain he was stable, they might put him on the next plane for Landstuhl—the military regional medical center—later that morning.
Jaime remembered when she had taken that flight, almost a year before, after being picked up along the highway in southern Iraq. She’d been away for nearly three years. The official story went that she’d had amnesia and spent the time with Iranian goatherds. In fact, although she had spent some time with goats, most of it had been spent in the place known as Eden. While most people in the world never suspected or believed it, the place that had come to be known as the Garden of Eden still existed. It was hidden—in fact, at any given time only twelve persons, known as Swords, knew the way in and out. At the end of an unusual adventure during her first tour in Iraq, Jaime had been invited to go to Eden, and she’d accepted.
She’d found Eden to be an altruistic society, whose citizens worked to help those in what they called the Terris world. There she’d spent a year in contemplation and gardening, and she was content. Until Clement had invited her to study at the place they called Mountaintop to join those they called the Integrators. The Integrators were citizens of Eden who moved back and forth between the two worlds. They included Messengers, who lived in the Terris world and delivered messages between other Integrators; Operatives, who had received special training in how to intervene in Terris affairs; and the twelve Swords who took people back and forth between the Terris world and Eden during the rare opportunities they called door openings.
J
aime discovered she felt called to be a person of action, and had trained to become an Eden Operative. Though the required training was three years, she’d been sent back a year early on special assignment.
That was nearly a year ago. Now Jaime was back in Iraq, in her Terris job, on assignment as a chaplain with the U.S. Army.
The unit with which Jaime had originally deployed to Iraq had finished their tour while she’d been gone. She’d been stationed in Germany the previous August when one of the chaplains assigned to the 5th COSCOM HQ had become ill and was shipped home. Jaime received the “Tag, you’re it!” phone call on a lazy Sunday afternoon while relaxing in her rental home in the little burg of Hochspeyer. In less than two weeks she was back in Iraq.
Jaime checked her watch as she entered the ICU. Twelve forty a.m. She needed to get to the COSCOM Operations Center and clean up a few loose ends before catching her flight to Kuwait. Her original plan was to catch a few hours of sleep before finishing up. But she was now wide awake. Perhaps she should head for the COSCOM, do what she needed to do, then see if sleep was still an option.
Confident her soldier was doing well, Jaime returned to the women’s dressing room, which was in truth a storeroom with a curtain hanging over the doorway. She removed her scrubs and donned the new ACU, or Army Combat Uniform, with the gray/green digital pattern. She laced up her desert boots, and pulled her dog tags off a hook hanging above her head. Her brother Joey—Joe, now, but he’d always be Joey to her—had kept them during the three years she had been missing in action. Jaime had retrieved them on her first visit Stateside when she reappeared. She looped them over her head and her blond hair, still obediently in its French braid. As the tags dropped inside her T-shirt, the various trinkets she had added over the years jangled reassuringly. They weren’t regulation, but it was comforting to know they were there.
As Jaime left the hospital compound she passed a smokers’ pavilion used by the staff on breaks. It was unlit, and she could barely make out the form of a man with a large backpack at his feet, and another one shaped like a teardrop slung across his shoulder, leaning against one of its support pillars. Mortaritaville, as the soldiers called Logistics Support Area Anaconda, was not well lit at night, to make it more difficult for insurgents to find targets for their mortar rounds.
That’s odd, she thought. Why would someone bother to come all the way out here, stand alone in the dark, and not even smoke?
As Jaime rounded the corner to walk the dark block to her headquarters, she didn’t notice the man from the pavilion pick up his backpack, sling it over his shoulders, and follow her down the street.
Table of Contents
Front Papers
prologue
thursday
friday
saturday
sunday
monday
epilogue
end notes
Table of Contents
Front Papers
prologue
thursday
friday
saturday
sunday
monday
epilogue
end notes
Beyond Eden Page 31