by Alan Zendell
“Except for the inconvenience it causes him, he completely ignores my injury and the pain I’m in. He’s either locked in his fortress or angry at me for upsetting his routine.
“Have you tried telling him what you need?”
“He doesn’t care, Dylan. I’m just a hindrance to him.”
She couldn’t hire someone to help out because Rod wouldn’t permit a stranger in the house. He wouldn’t even let the kids bring their friends down to the expensive playroom they’d had built. I had to struggle to suppress my anger.
“Remember last week when I asked you to get my briefcase from downstairs?”
“Sure.” I also remembered thinking Rod ought to keep his shit away from his family.
“Yesterday, I asked him to bring some things up from my office, and he snapped at me about handling my own affairs. I couldn’t manage the stairs with a full cast, so I went down like a toddler, on my butt, one step at a time. I was so angry, I forgot my shoulder bag, so I had to climb back up on one crutch carrying the stuff under my arm. I lost my balance and dropped it all. Some disks rolled toward Rod’s office door and I crawled after them. He came out, saw me on the floor outside his office, and started screaming at me about spying on him, that he had his hands full with his own problems and I should stay the hell out of his way. I’ve never seen him that way before. He ran past me up the stairs and slammed the front door on his way out.”
“This happened yesterday?”
“Yes, in the morning.” The Thursday of the short-lived blockade in the harbor, not the one that killed Samir and injured me.
“I know you feel terrible, but don’t do anything precipitous. You’ll be in the office next week, right? We’ll take a long lunch Monday and talk this through, okay?” Which would give me time to discuss it with Ilene, thank God.
“You know what the worst part is?” she asked. “When he’s really angry he curses in all those languages he speaks.”
Rod had grown up in Lazistan in eastern Turkey, one of those places that changed hands, politically, every generation. Rod, which he’d anglicized from Rasid, spoke Turkish, Laz, Armenian, Russian, Arabic, and Kurdish, to name a few, which was probably why he was so valuable to his think tank employer. Maybe I was paranoid, but his extreme behavior suggested that he might be involved in something else, too. Given everything else Gayle was dealing with, I thought she had a right to know as she evaluated what to do about her marriage. Maybe William could use his connections to check him out.
“What’s the name of that outfit he works for?”
“DNZ-LLC, formerly called the Dinza Group. It’s a Black Sea trade association headquartered in New York.”
That sounded suspiciously like my own cover. I tried cheering her up for a few minutes, until it was time to catch my train.
***
Whatever Jerry may have expected, it wasn’t Ilene’s opening salvo.
“Dylan and I are really grateful for the way you handled our situation last Sunday, but a lot has changed since then.” She’d selected a different chair this time. We were arranged in an isosceles triangle, with her in an equal position. Handing him the case studies he’d given me, and sounding more like a colleague discussing a case than a client, she said, “We won’t be needing these anymore.”
Jerry raised his eyebrows. “I’m sorry they didn’t help.”
“They did,” I said. “They were just what I needed to stabilize me at the time.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m fine. There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“You’re not living Thursday before Wednesday any more?”
“Actually, I am.”
Jerry shot Ilene a pleading look.
“He really is,” she said. “Jerry, you know me. I wouldn’t say that if I weren’t absolutely sure. I witnessed it myself.”
“I don’t understand.”
I felt for the guy. “Tell him, Ilene.”
So she did, about waking up Wednesday without me, finding me injured at St. Vincent’s, then waking up next to me on Thursday before I was hurt, and again this morning with the burns on my face healing and scabs where the other injuries had bled on Wednesday night. My head was spinning when she was done, but Jerry, bless him, stuck with her all the way. If she hadn’t been someone he knew and trusted, I don’t know how it would have turned out, but in the end he was able to suspend his disbelief. He examined my face and felt the scabs. Then, I placed his fingers on the still sizable lump over my left ear, where my head had impacted the truck, causing my concussion.
“This happened, how?” he asked.
“That’s a whole different thing. It’s delicate.” I wished I’d taken more time to think this through before we got there, but Ilene rescued me.
“Jerry, I know how seriously you take confidentiality, but before we can say any more, you need to understand that this involves an entirely different degree of secrecy, and even then we can only share some of it. Are you sure you want us to continue?”
“If you don’t, I’ll be up nights wondering about it.”
“It’s all right, Ilene,” I said, “I’ll tell him. Remember my idiotic quip about secret lives and CIA agents?”
“How could I forget it? It almost felt like you were baiting me with it.”
“Maybe I was laying a trap for myself, but this isn’t a multiple personality thing, it’s real. I can’t go into details, but I’ve been involved in covert activities for most of my adult life.”
“He has,” Ilene confirmed.
“Okay,” Jerry said. “Let’s start from there, at least as a working hypothesis.”
“You know, Jerry, when we discussed coming back here, I told Ilene that what I valued most about you was your honest skepticism. There are risks involved for all of us in telling you this. What convinced me to go ahead is that you’ve probably already seen some of it on the news.” Since morning, the story had grown legs, as they say in the news business. The media hadn’t dropped it.
“You mean that ship explosion? That’s how you were injured?”
“Yes, sort of.”
“I’m confused. You said he was hurt on Wednesday, Ilene.”
“No, I didn’t. I said he’d already been injured when I saw him on Wednesday. That’s the whole point, Jerry. His injuries occurred on Thursday.”
“But the explosion was this morning.”
“In your time stream,” I said. “In mine it happened on Thursday, at a pier on Staten Island, and I was there. Three of my friends were killed by it.”
He looked hard at me and then at Ilene.
“Believe him, Jerry, it’s real. I’ve been living with it since Wednesday morning.”
I think it was the earnest look on Ilene’s face that tipped the balance for him from half empty to half full. He was still skeptical, but he was fully engaged with us. Ilene and I explained it all, leaving out anything specific about the Agency, isotopes, or terrorists. I even described my trampoline analogy of space-time.
“What do you need from me?” he asked.
“We’d like you to be an honest broker for us, an objective ear, someone who’s not afraid to butt in when necessary. Beyond that I’m hoping you can be there to support Ilene. You can make a real difference for her on days like Wednesday, helping her keep her bearings. This is very confusing for both of us, but especially for her. I have a degree of control, but she never knows what to expect.”
“I can try. What else?”
“I’m not sure about the rest. We need to find ways to communicate with each other, especially dealing with realities and memories that sometimes contradict each other. I don’t mean communication skills. There are all sorts of practical issues, like having another set of eyes and ears keeping track of what happens and comparing notes.”
20.
A common interrogation technique is preventing prisoners from getting adequate sleep on the theory, I suppose, that a sleepy terrorist is a sloppy terrorist. When William called late
Saturday afternoon, he sounded as though someone forgot to tell him the technique wasn’t for use on interrogators.
“Those two guys you ferreted out spilled their guts, not that there was much in them. I don’t know where your hunches come from, but you were right on every count. Turns out that four canisters went overboard after Al Khalifa dropped anchor, to be picked up by a submersible homing in on sonar beacons. We think it happened shortly after Sam inspected the ship.”
That rang a bell. Other than those owned by NOAA, the Navy, or the Coast Guard, submersibles weren’t a plentiful commodity. One of the Navy’s knee-jerk reactions to the attack on the USS Cole had been to entertain proposals on the use of submersibles, actually unarmed miniature submarines packed with electronic equipment, for port defense and security. A lot of the development work had been done at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, commonly referred to as APL, which had a long history of working with the Navy on submarine warfare. A former colleague of mine had managed the project.
I had years of intelligence work to thank for the associations that fell into place. This was the third time I’d come across a mention of submersibles in the last few months, something to which I might have attached no significance, but for the pathways in my brain carved by countless tedious hours spent sorting data, looking for obscure patterns and connections where most people saw only unrelated snippets of information.
There’d been an article in the Sunday Times Magazine describing simulations conducted by researchers from Rutgers and Princeton on the potential use of high tech submersibles as an effective line of defense of the ports of New York and Philadelphia. Such were the times we lived in that the article probably never would have surfaced if the Administration hadn’t been on the defensive over not fulfilling its brag to permanently shut down Al Qaeda.
More recently, my firm had floated a memo on foreign marketing opportunities for minisubs based on leaks from the State Department that the Government was on the verge of allowing them to be leased to allies in the war against terror. What particularly caught my eye at the time was that the list of potential customers included Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Yemen.
William saw where I was headed immediately and said he’d get back to me.
***
Monday was a busy day in the office. I’d been gone a few days, and things had piled up. I needed to talk to Jim. William was going to be taking more of my time, and Jim had to know I wouldn’t be there much.
Whatever the Agency had told him years ago must have made a big impression, because he didn’t let me finish. He assured me that he knew what was most important, and not to worry about it; he’d fill in for me himself. We spent the morning going over my projects until Gayle came hobbling by for our lunch date. Anticipating a difficult and delicate interaction, I’d asked Ilene how she thought I should handle it.
“She probably needs someone to vent to more than anything,” Ilene had advised. “She has no one to talk to about it, so listen and keep your mouth shut as much as possible.” I knew Ilene was right. Getting involved in someone else’s marriage was almost always a bad idea.
It turned out Ilene’s advice was harder to follow than I’d anticipated. Things had changed over the weekend. I’d expected to find myself consoling someone on the verge of ending her marriage, helping maintain her equilibrium and judgment, but Gayle surprised me.
“I feel a little foolish after saying those things to you on Friday. I guess this,” she pointed at her plaster-enclosed ankle, “had me off my game.”
Heeding Ilene’s advice, I put what I hoped was a supportive expression on my face and nodded.
“Rod’s not quite the brute I made him out to be,” she continued. “Yesterday, the kids were out playing and I was sitting in my office feeling sorry for myself, still a bit out of breath from negotiating that narrow staircase, when I sensed him standing in the doorway looking at me. When I looked up he averted his eyes. Then he came in and pulled a chair over to sit beside me. He took my hands and told me he knew he’d been behaving badly, that he wished he could take it all back. He was sorry he’d made things so difficult for me.”
She had tears in her eyes as she spoke, and I realized how desperately she’d wanted that from him. I can’t say I was entirely convinced by Rod’s mea culpa, because I’d heard less intense versions of this before, but again, thanks to Ilene, I just smiled and told Gayle how happy I was for her. Rod had even apologized for not being able to share the other parts of his life with her, saying he wished he could, because the past weeks had been hellish.
“That’s exactly what you said on the phone, Friday.” I’d noticed that, too.
“I didn’t have to say anything,” she told me. “It was like he was reading my mind. He said he was going to make more of an effort to stay in touch with me when he was on the road from now on, that he was attending a conference in Washington this week.” The State Department was updating its policy directives and advice for Americans doing business in the Middle East and southwestern Asia, and he had several days of briefings and meetings to attend.
“He hasn’t been that open about his work in longer than I can remember. We wound up having a pleasant day. We took the kids to Six Flags, and he seemed to revel in pushing me around in a wheelchair, which embarrassed the hell out of me. And remember when I was complaining about how harsh he sounds when he curses in Turkish and Armenian? He even made me remember how charming I used to think his accent was when I married him.”
I hardly knew what to make of it all, but it was obvious that she didn’t need my help. Was she fooling herself? I didn’t know, but it would have been a mistake to probe.
***
William called on Tuesday morning.
“It seems that the submersibles research project you read about involved more than the university teams. APL set it up as a commercial venture pending government approval and scheduled demos for potential clients when their minisub wasn’t being used by the researchers.”
“Was there any security?”
“Every requestor had to submit a proposal explaining how they intended to use the submersible. APL was supposed to thoroughly vet every request, and the sub could only be piloted by one of their people during the demos.”
“Did the Government approve the list?”
“In theory, but you know how that goes, sometimes.”
I did. Scientists liked to pretend science was above politics. They could be especially careless and impatient with government regulations when they were dealing with colleagues.
“Maybe you should pay your friend at APL a visit,” he said. “Let him know we’re not out to make trouble for him, but we need to see his list. Use your judgment and tell him what you need to to get him to cooperate. You can threaten him with an investigation if you have to.”
The notion of threatening John Barksdale seemed ludicrous to me. For one thing, he probably wouldn’t have been the least bit intimidated, and for another, I was sure it wouldn’t be necessary. I called him as soon as I was off the phone with William. John sounded genuinely happy to hear from me.
“How long has it been, Dylan? I heard you were making a pile of money in international business these days. Why didn’t I think of that?”
“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, John. Besides, what you heard has a few inaccuracies in it. The piles of money aren’t that big, and that’s not all I do.”
“Sounds mysterious. You whetting my appetite?”
“Not on an open phone line.” He chuckled at that. Back when we worked together there was still a lot of cold war black humor about spies and conspiracies. “I was thinking about coming down to see you.”
“That’d be great. When?”
“As soon as possible. How about Thursday morning?” The timing created a dilemma for me. As soon as possible meant tomorrow, but my tomorrow wasn’t the same as his.
“How early can you get here?”
“I
’ll take the train down to BWI tomorrow night. Just tell me when.”
We agreed on 9:00, and he said there’d be a visitor badge waiting for me. Of course, I wouldn’t be taking the train on Wednesday night at all. I’d make a hotel reservation for two nights and head south that evening. I’d go to sleep in the hotel on Tuesday night, and unless the Übermensch had another surprise in store for me, I’d wake up, still in Maryland, on Thursday morning. It only took a few seconds to work that out. I was starting to get the hang of this.
It didn’t seem fair that I had to pay for two nights to spend one. Maybe I could make up for it by making a decent stock buy this week.
21.
APL was located in the suburbs halfway between Baltimore and Washington, an area of beautiful countryside rapidly filling with upscale housing developments and chic new Town Centers. Quite lovely except for the oppressively muggy summer heat. John had suggested that I stay a few miles north in Columbia, a planned community of 100,000 people built around a big shopping mall. My first thought was, “Ugh!” but it had a decent hotel built on an artificial lake only a ten-minute drive from his office.
Instead of the kind of surprise I’d had in mind, the Übermensch settled for a rather unfunny practical joke. The hotel incorrectly entered my reservation as a one-night stay, and on Wednesday they rented my apparently unused room to an attractive forty-ish business woman. That night, she engaged her security lock and climbed into the very same luxuriant king-sized bed that I had the night before, nude and alone. She awakened Thursday morning to find me sleeping next to her.
I’m sure she suffered a moment of confusion. Had she had one too many martinis the night before and spent the night doing things she now didn’t remember? She must have quickly decided that a fifty-ish hairy-chested man whose only visible adornment was a wedding band on his left hand wasn’t her type. She began hurling curses at me, and foregoing modesty, she lunged for the dresser, grabbed her purse, and pulled out a vial of pepper spray. Time froze just long enough for me to realize that negotiation wasn’t an option.