Poe

by Battles, Brett

  His smile was broad. She opened her arms, and he hugged her.

  “Hi, Danny.”

  “Aleck. You here. Make me happy.”

  “Make me happy, too.”

  Danny had been born with Down syndrome. While he was physically two years older than Alex, mentally he was still a small child. Even at a young age, Alex had seemed to sense that it was her job to take care of him, and she’d watched after him ever since. This sense of protectiveness had only increased when their mother was killed and their father, who used to call Danny his “little lieutenant,” disappeared.

  It had taken their relatives nearly a year to convince Alex to find a place for Danny to live without her once she reached eighteen. Seven years later, she still felt guilty for making that decision. Almost as guilty as she felt for joining the army and leaving him for two long years. But that was something she had to do. She needed to show the military that enlistees from her family, which had a long history with the army, were good soldiers, and by doing so, prove that they had to be wrong about her dad.

  Thankfully, Danny never seemed to blame her for anything. His excitement was the same every time he saw her, whether the absence was a day, a week, or several months.

  He turned now, suddenly remembering the TV, and started mumbling along again. Alex was happy just to be next to him, happy to have his hand in hers, happy to see him happy.

  When the cartoon finally ended, she said, “You want to go outside?”

  “French fry?”

  “You want French fries?”

  He nodded, and half laughed. “Yeah.”

  After letting Mrs. Thornton know they were going out, Alex led her brother to her car. Danny lived at a pace different than most people’s. By the time Alex circled around to the driver’s side, climbed in, and belted up, Danny was only pulling his seatbelt on.

  She resisted the urge to help him, and watched as he slowly fastened himself in.

  “All set?” she asked.

  He smiled. “All set.”

  Dairy Queen was their usual stop. They arrived right before lunchtime, so there were only a couple people in line in front of them.

  “You want ketchup with your fries?” Alex knew the answer, but she always asked.

  “Three ketchup,” Danny said.

  “You got it. And to drink?”

  “Root beer,” he said, almost singing the words. “Root beer. Root beer. Root beer.”

  That caused a few of the customers to look, but most just smiled when they realized it was Danny.

  Alex and Danny’s turn came moments later, and soon they were sitting at a table by the window, a hot serving of fries and sodas in front of them.

  Alex watched her brother eat, enjoying the pleasure he took out of every bite. There were times when she wished they could talk about whatever came to mind, discuss science and politics, and, hell, even family. But they would never have that kind of relationship. Simple conversations were it with Danny. Anything more and he’d be lost.

  As he chewed his fries, he rocked happily side to side. Alex knew he always had a song playing in his head. She wondered which one it was this time. Something from SpongeBob? A Christmas song? “The Hamster Dance”? They were all favorites.

  It was at times like this she wished, if only for a little while, she could enter the world he lived in—the simple life he led, the easy joys, and, of course, the easy sorrows. Life where she had to live it was far more complicated. It made her tired just thinking about the difference.

  When there were only a few fries left, she knew she couldn’t wait any longer. “Danny.”

  He looked up, grinning.

  She smiled. “Good, huh?”

  “Goooood,” he said, laughing.

  “Not so loud, okay, buddy?”

  “Not so loud. Sorry, Aleck.”

  “It’s okay. I know you like them.”

  Danny picked up another fry and dunked it in his glob of ketchup.

  “Danny, look at me for a moment, okay?”

  He stuck the fry in his mouth, then, in typical delayed fashion, he finally looked at her.

  She tried to give him a reassuring smile, but knew it left a lot to be desired. “Look, I…I’m going on a trip. And I’m not sure how long I might be gone.”

  Danny stared at her, his expression unchanged.

  She paused. “Baseball this weekend, remember?”

  His face lit up. “Baseball. We go.” He was a huge Baltimore Orioles fan. He didn’t always understand what was going on, but the pace of the game, coupled with the excitement of being in the stadium, was more than enough to make his day.

  “I can’t, Danny. Not this weekend. I’ll take you when I come back.”

  His smile faltered. “No baseball?” His eyes began to water, the easy sorrow settling in.

  “Yes, baseball,” she said quickly, hoping to forestall the tears. “But not this weekend. When I come back.” She could see he was trying to understand, so she reached out and put a hand on his. “We’ll go. Don’t worry. We’ll go a lot this year, I promise. Just not this weekend.”

  “Not this weekend.”

  “Right.” She still wasn’t sure if he completely got it, but he didn’t cry, so she took that as a small victory.

  “Where you go?” he asked.

  “On a trip.”

  He looked at her as if waiting for more. It was one of his traits that made her wonder at times if his comprehension was better than he let on.

  Unable to resist his gaze, she said, “A business trip. Overseas.”

  “Doing?” he asked.

  “What I always do. Catching a bad guy.”

  That usually made him laugh, but not this time. He picked up the last fry, dipped it several times in the ketchup, and set it back down without eating it.

  Before she even realized it, the words were out of her mouth. “This person might know where Dad is.”

  That did the trick. “Dad?”

  She bit the inside of her mouth. “I don’t kn—”

  “Dad here?”

  “No. Dad’s not here. I don’t know where he is.”

  “Trip to Dad?”

  “No, I’m not going to see Dad. I’m sorry, Danny. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “Mom with Dad?”

  Alex’s heart clenched. It never failed. Every time she mentioned their father, Danny would eventually bring up their mom, too. “No, Danny. Mom’s gone. Remember?”

  “With Dad?”

  “No. Mom’s in heaven. Mom…Mom died a long time ago. You remember that. We buried her.”

  Buried wasn’t exactly accurate. What they’d buried was an empty casket. Months later, they had been given a small box of ashes containing the remains of what had been found of their mother’s body after a bomb had taken her life. She had been a professor of anthropology at Georgetown University, and was in Lebanon on one of her many academic trips. The bomb had gone off outside a café, killing two others in addition to her. It was officially blamed on Hezbollah, just another moment of violence in a part of the world where it was commonplace. Since an American had died, it had received some attention in the States, but it was soon pushed to the side when a pair of planes smashed into the Twin Towers a couple days later.

  Danny was smiling. “Mom in heaven, with angels.”

  “Yes, with the angels.”

  “Angels on the box,” he said.

  “Angels on the box,” she repeated. It was something Danny always said when he talked about their mom. Alex had no idea where it had come from or what it might mean, but it seemed to give him comfort, and it always signaled that he was ready to talk about something else.

  He picked up the remaining fry and finished it.

  “You go see Dad,” he told her.

  She sighed. “No, Danny. I’m not going to see Dad.”

  “You go see Dad. Come back we go baseball.” He pointed at her, said, “Aleck,” then at himself, “Danny,” and finally past her toward the do
or, “and Dad.”

  She couldn’t help but look over her shoulder, as if it were possible for her brother to conjure their father out of thin air, so the three of them could go to a ballgame like they used to do when she and Danny were kids.

  But the doorway was empty.

  “Baseball when I come back,” she said. “Now let’s get you home.”

  * * *

  ALEX WATCHED ANOTHER episode of SpongeBob with her brother before hugging him goodbye and heading out to her car. She started the engine, but instead of heading out, she retrieved her phone and called McElroy.

  “Okay,” she said once he was on the line.

  “Okay what?”

  “I’m in.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. I’m sure.”

  “You might want to write this down.”

  She grabbed a notepad and pen out of the glove compartment. “Go.”

  McElroy rattled off a set of directions. “Be there with your partner at eight a.m. tomorrow morning.”

  “Are you going to tell me where this El-Hashim is now?”

  “Not until I have your signed contracts in my hand. I’ll see you at eight.”

  The line went dead.

  Chapter Six

  “Deuce, let’s go!” Alex yelled as she knocked on Deuce’s apartment door for a third time.

  She heard something bang against it on the other side, then it jerked open.

  “Chill, man. I’m ready,” he said. He was wearing cargo pants and a blue, unbuttoned short-sleeve shirt over a gray, Jack Daniel’s tank top.

  “That’s what you’re wearing?”

  He looked down at his clothes. “What? I didn’t get any notice about a dress code.”

  Alex made no further comment. In truth, she was dressed only marginally better than he was—jeans and a black, long-sleeve T-shirt. No logo or picture, though.

  They rode in silence through town and onto I-295. Joining the traffic moving southwest toward DC, Alex found herself thinking about her father. It was pretty much something she’d been doing nonstop since she’d said goodbye to Danny, and had made for a very rough, uneven night of sleep.

  “Hello?” Deuce said. “Alex, you in there?”

  She blinked and glanced over. “What?”

  “I asked you a question.”

  She looked back at the road. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

  “Obviously.” He was silent for second, then said, “My question was, are you going to tell me why you changed your mind about Stonewell or what?”

  Alex hesitated.

  “Please tell me you heard me this time,” Deuce said.

  “I heard you.”

  “And?”

  “And they need us to help with an extraction.”

  “That doesn’t really answer my question.”

  “The target, a week ago, she was seen with…my father.”

  Silence.

  “Are you serious?”

  Alex nodded. “I’ve seen the pictures. It was him.”

  “Holy shit.”

  Deuce had never met her dad, but as one of Alex’s closest friends, he was well aware of the colonel’s disappearance.

  Neither of them spoke for a moment, then Deuce said, “So we’re helping because she might know where he is, right?”

  “Right.”

  He nodded. “I’m cool with that.”

  “I knew you would be.”

  * * *

  Washington, DC

  MCELROY CHECKED HIS watch. It was almost eight a.m.

  As he paced his office, he fought the urge to look out the window.

  Where the hell was Poe?

  God help him if she’d decided to back out. He did not want to miss this opportunity.

  The tip had come in through one of his Eastern European contacts. Fadilah El-Hashim, terrorist money launderer extraordinaire, had been spotted. And being high on Stonewell’s acquire list, she immediately became McElroy’s priority.

  Within an hour, McElroy had dispatched a small team to follow up on the information. The intelligence proved to be good. Excellent, in fact. El-Hashim was still there.

  McElroy immediately informed his superiors, and presented them with two options of how to proceed. The first, grab El-Hashim immediately and deliver her to the CIA for interrogation. The second, keep her under observation, see who she met with, and see who else they could net before they brought her in.

  When McElroy was pressed for his preferred plan, he said, “It’s a risk, but I think it would be a mistake to apprehend her right away.”

  The directors had concurred and approved option two, making it clear that if El-Hashim were to somehow avoid capture, it would be McElroy’s ass in the fire.

  The strategy had paid off. Within the first two weeks, they added several new names to their terror watch list, and uncovered a whole new Somalian splinter organization that had yet to show up on anyone else’s radar.

  But a trip El-Hashim made to Crimea changed everything.

  The moment McElroy saw the photos his surveillance team extracted from a security camera along the waterfront in Yalta, he no longer thought of El-Hashim as his number one target. The photos showed the woman in her everpresent hijab, talking to a man.

  But not just any man.

  To Raven. The son of a bitch who’d given McElroy’s team the slip back in May.

  If McElroy could bring Frank Poe in, especially after the earlier snafu, the reservations that he knew some of Stonewell’s management had about him would disappear, removing the final obstacles to future advancement.

  At the same time, it could also backfire on him. If, that was, his bosses knew about the Raven sighting.

  While he’d been routinely giving progress reports on the El-Hashim mission, his briefing that day made no mention of the wayward colonel. The only people who knew Raven had been sighted were a limited number of his trusted team members.

  Get Poe first, then break the news. That would be best.

  To do that, he would have to go through El-Hashim. He knew she must have some way of contacting the traitor, which meant the time had come to bring her in.

  He put the nab team in place near her home base in the Czech Republic so they could grab her as soon as she returned from Crimea. Unfortunately, that had yet to happen. Somehow the foolish woman had gotten herself and several of her associates arrested. About the only good thing that had come of this was that the officials in Crimea didn’t seem to know who they had. El-Hashim was listed under a false name—A’isha Najem.

  It took McElroy less than ten minutes to get over his annoyance, and realize the new situation might actually provide an opportunity. What if he could get someone into the prison to bring El-Hashim out?

  The logistics were solved fairly quickly with the old standby combo of blackmail and money. And with the how figured out, it became a question of who?

  The operative would have to be a woman, someone who could think on her feet and blend in with the other female prisoners. While Stonewell did have female security employees, they were few in number and all were assigned elsewhere.

  McElroy was looking through the digital archive on Raven when he came upon a mention of the colonel’s daughter and everything clicked. Not only had she spent two years in the army before going to college, she now worked as a domestic fugitive retrieval specialist, or, as most called it, a bounty hunter.

  She was perfect.

  And she had a Stonewell file, too. But instead of containing a gigabyte of information like her father’s, her dossier was under one meg, consisting merely of reports on previous attempts by the company to recruit her. All had failed.

  That didn’t bother McElroy. None of the previous attempts had included the leverage he had.

  A link to her father.

  As he read through her file again, he saw a cross reference to another Stonewell employee named Shane Cooper. According to the document, Cooper had served with her in t
he army.

  McElroy worked out a deal to have the man temporarily transferred to his group, thinking that Cooper would have knowledge of Alex that might prove useful.

  In the end, it wasn’t Cooper’s insights that had helped secure her services, but the man’s ability to take a punch.

  Unfortunately, all of his maneuvering would be wasted effort if Alexandra Poe didn’t show up.

  But as he started to check his watch again, the door behind him opened, and one of the receptionists stuck his head in. “Sir? Your visitors are parking now.”

  * * *

  THE STONEWELL COMPOUND was in a forested area about four miles outside of DC, down an unmarked road that was easy to miss if you didn’t know where you were going. Fortunately, McElroy’s coordinates had been very precise and Alex had no trouble finding the place.

  A quarter of a mile in, a guardhouse stood in the middle of the road, flanked on either side by a gated fence that disappeared into the woods. Topping the fence were large coils of razor wire.

  As Alex pulled her Jeep to a halt, a uniformed man stepped out of the guardhouse. This wasn’t some fifty-year-old, potbellied rent-a-cop just doing time, however. He couldn’t have been more than thirty, with the build and demeanor of a human bull.

  He leaned down and looked inside the Jeep as she lowered the window.

  “Ms. Poe, Mr. Jones. Welcome to Stonewell.”

  Alex and Deuce nodded.

  “Put this on your dash,” the guard said, handing her a piece of paper through the window. He looked out at the road beyond the gate. “Continue on for four tenths of a mile, then make a right, and that’ll take you to the parking area next to the main building. Your assigned spot is number seventy-two. Please make sure you use only that number. When you arrive, stay in your car until someone comes out to get you.”

  Alex raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything.

  The man took a step back, reached behind him, and pushed something just inside the guardhouse door. The gate began rolling out of the way. “Have a good day.”

  Alex was tempted to give him a salute, but didn’t. Instead she hit the gas and started forward again, knowing what Deuce would say before he even opened his mouth.

  “Stay in the car, huh? I’ve got a better idea. How about we turn around right now and head back home? It’s not too late, you know.”