Primary Target

by Jack Mars

  Also, the Russian and Chinese spy agencies. You knew they were listening. And the billionaire Russian gangsters who sent their uncouth lout children to this expensive school. Were they listening? Probably.

  Also, the security office here at the school. Of course they were listening. Providing security was a big part of the babysitting service here, and the school advertised to parents about how “seamlessly the school’s security apparatus can dovetail with your own to safeguard every moment of your child’s learning experience.”

  She felt like screaming.

  She sat for a moment on her bed. Outside the window, it was night in Switzerland. She could see the lights of boats on Lake Geneva from here, and the darkness of the mountains towering on the other side of the lake. She could even see the twinkling lights of villages high on the hillsides.

  For a moment, she looked at herself in the full-length mirror across from her bed. She was pretty. She knew that. She had long brown hair and a very nice body, even if she had to say so herself. But she was eighteen years old, and she had barely even kissed a boy in her life. No boy could get through the security cordon around her.

  She was bored! She was trapped! She was going to die a virgin!

  She could not believe that this was her life. She couldn’t say a word without people listening in. She couldn’t go anywhere without large men following her, encircling her, protecting her.

  And really, she couldn’t go anywhere at all. Everyplace she wanted to go was a security risk.

  Well, she would see about that, wouldn’t she?

  She got up and walked through her apartment to the bathroom that she shared with her suitemate. She crossed through the room with its heated tile floors, its rain shower and five-foot-wide vanity and mirror—it was a nice bathroom, she had to admit. Her family was old money—they didn’t believe in luxurious things—and she had never had a bathroom like this one before.

  She knocked on the adjoining door.

  “Come in!” a voice said.

  Elizabeth opened the door and entered. Suddenly, she was in another world—the apartment of Rita Chadwick. The apartments were the same generic layout—bedroom, small kitchen, and living area—but Rita had personalized hers. She had a sense of bohemian hippie culture, and the place was hung with drapes and beads and Tibetan prayer flags. On one wall was a giant poster called “Earthrise,” showing planet Earth as it supposedly looked from the moon. On another was a life-sized poster of the rapper Eminem on stage, wearing a T-shirt and dripping sweat.

  Rita wore bell-bottom jeans and a flowered shirt. She was darkly pretty, and had straight black hair tied back with a purple headwrap.

  Allowing Elizabeth to have a suitemate was the one nod to normalcy that her dad, the Secret Service, and the school would give her. Even that was hardly normal. Elizabeth and Rita were suitemates and friends, but they led very different lives.

  Rita’s family had owned magazines and newspapers for two centuries. She had wealth, but no security to speak of—her family was fine with the level of security provided by the school. It was nothing for Rita to hire a car service to take her the twenty miles into Geneva on weekend nights. She would eat in the restaurants and party in the dance clubs until the early hours of the morning, then take a car back here, arriving home around dawn.

  Or sometimes not at all.

  Sometimes on weekend nights, after participating in whatever lame group activities were on offer here on campus, Elizabeth would wake up in the early hours before sunrise and listen to see if Rita had come home that night.

  Rita had freedom, and lots of it—and Elizabeth had none. The Secret Service had vetted Rita and found her not to be a threat, mostly because there was no way to smuggle anyone on campus. People she knew in Geneva could visit her, but only during the daytime, and they couldn’t come into the building at all. After they passed through security, they had to sit out on the campus grounds.

  Rita was sitting on her bed, making a drawing on a pad with a thick black pencil. “Hey, babe,” she said, without looking up.

  “Hey, babe,” Elizabeth said.

  Hey, babe—that was their thing. They called each other babe.

  Elizabeth’s friendship with Rita was one of the few good things that had come out of this school year. Rita was going to Brown next year, in Providence, Rhode Island, just up the road from Yale. Elizabeth was hopeful that they would stay in touch, and stay friends. But you never could tell. A lot of these so-called friendships fell apart after you weren’t in the same space anymore.

  “How’s your dad?” Rita said.

  “You know,” Elizabeth said.

  Rita nodded. “I know. He’s President, and that’s a big job.”

  “That’s right.”

  Rita flipped the page in her drawing pad. Now she was writing something instead of drawing.

  “I imagine he’s busy doing Presidential things.”

  “He’s very busy acting Presidential,” Elizabeth said.

  It was dummy talk. Over time, they had evolved a system of communication that the Secret Service couldn’t overhear or intercept. They would continue to talk normally, about this or that, like dizzy high school girls. All the while, they would pass written messages back and forth, which they would later rip up and throw out in the dining hall garbage cans.

  Rita turned the pad around and showed Elizabeth what she had written.

  Do you still want to go for it? Escape Mode?

  Escape Mode was a plan that Rita had invented for Elizabeth, a way to break her out of the prison she was in and give her a chance to experience a little adventure, a little excitement, and what little nightlife the city of Geneva had to offer.

  The plan was daring, to say the least. Breathtaking. Audacious. If it worked, it would only work once. So any attempt at it was a one-time chance, a desperate grab for all the marbles.

  Their rooms were two stories above the ground, but their windows opened to a rooftop that sloped downward to the edge. According to Rita, there was a rain gutter out there made of a hard metal, like steel or iron. It was not flimsy. She knew this because she had climbed down it on a couple of occasions during the middle of the night to visit a boy in one of the other dorms.

  Escape Mode involved Rita preparing to go to Geneva on a weekend night. Meanwhile, Elizabeth would pretend to turn in early—while also preparing for a night out. Rita would call for a car service to pick her up. When the car came, Rita would go downstairs like she always did. Elizabeth would sit inside with the TV set on, loud. Elizabeth had been watching the TV with the sound way up for months, on the off chance she would ever get the guts to try Escape Mode.

  With the TV on, Elizabeth would then slide out the window she had opened earlier, cross the roof silently, shimmy down the rain gutter, drop to the ground, then run for the driveway turnaround where the car would be parked.

  Once she was inside the car, they would head for the gates of the school. The car’s windows would be blacked, and according to Rita, security on the way out of campus was cursory—a wave-through—compared to how it was on the way in.

  If they made it through the gates, for once in her life Elizabeth would be free. Rita would take her to Club Baroque, where the dance music DJs played, and they would dance to house music in a packed nightclub until the place closed. Then they would go for food and coffee, and get back here at dawn.

  It was the crime of the century. There were boys who lived in Geneva—their families were in banking—whom Rita hung out with. Sometimes they came to campus during visiting hours. One of them was a very handsome young guy from Turkey named Ahmet. He was thin, with curly black hair and skin the shade of coffee—light and sweet, Rita called it. He wore American-style clothes. He spoke English. He was normal—not like a lot of Arab guys, who were religious fanatics.

  Were Turkish guys Arabs? Elizabeth wasn’t sure about that. But Rita had told Elizabeth that Ahmet thought she was cute.

  Rita handed Elizabeth the pencil. She t
apped the words Escape Mode? Elizabeth made a quick scrawl in response.

  Yes.

  “Well, you know,” Rita said, “when you’re leader of the free world, you have a lot to worry about. Wars going on everywhere, fingers on the button, Yuri’s dad cutting off natural gas supplies to Europe.”

  Yuri was an idiotic fourteen-year-old boy from Moscow who went to school here, and who delighted in telling anyone who would listen that his father controlled the natural gas pipeline running from Russia to Germany. Yuri hadn’t gotten his growth spurt yet. He wasn’t even five feet tall.

  Elizabeth handed the pencil back.

  “That’s all Yuri has, natural gas,” she said.

  Clock’s ticking, Rita wrote. School year’s over. Friday night?

  “And he blows it up everybody’s ass,” Rita said.

  Elizabeth took the pencil and circled the original Yes.

  Sure? Rita wrote.

  Elizabeth circled the word again. Now it was Yes in two big black circles.

  They both laughed at poor little Yuri. Silly boy.

  Good, Rita wrote. It’ll be fun.

  Elizabeth nodded. “Fun,” she said. It was a weird thing to say, since it didn’t quite follow what Rita had said, but it was all Elizabeth could think of.

  Fun.

  And that was all it was to Rita, who took her vast freedom for granted. Her nights in Geneva, her occasional side trips to London and Paris and Milan. But to Elizabeth, it was something else again. It was huge, it was energizing, it was terrifying. Her entire body tingled when she thought about it. Her breath caught in her throat.

  Would she be able to go through with it?

  Would she be able to make herself climb through the window and shimmy down the rain gutter? Then what? A drive through the countryside to the city. A crowded club with lights flaring, music pumping, bodies pressed together. Drinks? Sure, she would have a drink, even though she was technically too young. Just a long hoped for night of adventure. The chance to be anonymous, among anonymous people, and maybe have some real fun for once.

  Well, her dad told her to do something exciting, didn’t he?

  Who was she kidding? Her parents would kill her if they found out, and they were definitely going to find out. Escape Mode only went in one direction. There was no plan for coming back in. There was no way to shimmy back up the rain gutter. She would just have to reenter the campus, and the building, the old-fashioned way.

  By then, the Secret Service man outside her door would have probably grown suspicious of the TV playing all night and let himself in. The alarm would be raised. There might even be an international incident.

  Elizabeth felt herself ramping up with anxiety. She took a deep breath to try to calm herself down. After this, she was going to be grounded until she was forty.

  Rita wrote something new. She turned it around so Elizabeth could see.

  Ahmet will be there.

  CHAPTER TEN

  6:15 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

  The Skies over the Atlantic Ocean

  The small blue jet with the US Department of State logo streaked north and east across the sky, dark water below them.

  Inside the plane, Luke and his new team moved tentatively toward working together for the first time—they used the front four passenger seats as their meeting area. They stowed their luggage, and their gear, in the seats at the back.

  Luke glanced around.

  This was the young team. They looked like some kind of youth group going for their first overnight.

  Trudy Wellington sat directly across from Luke, occasionally tossing her curly brown hair out of her face. She was slim and attractive in a green sweatshirt and blue jeans. Her blue eyes hid behind her big, red-rimmed owl glasses.

  Across from Luke and to the left, facing him, was Mark Swann. He stretched his long bird legs out into the aisle, an old pair of ripped jeans and a pair of red Chuck Taylor sneakers there for anyone to trip over. His aviator glasses were tinted yellow. He wore a black Ramones T-shirt, covered by a red flannel shirt.

  In the seat next to Luke sat Ed Newsam. His jacket was off now, demonstrating his rippling upper body. He was steely-eyed, huge, a bear of a man. He wore a precisely trimmed beard, his hair shaved to the skin on the sides with about an inch on top. Both his beard and his hair were jet black.

  All three of these people were staring hard at Luke. None of them looked friendly. Trudy and Swann seemed edgy, skittish almost, as though their lack of confidence in Luke made them nervous. Newsam didn’t seem nervous at all. He sat back in his seat as though he might fall asleep at any moment.

  “So what’s the story, boss man?” he said.

  Luke smiled. He and this big kid were going to get tangled up. He could see that already. “Boss man, huh?”

  “Would you prefer if I call you Hot Rod?” Newsam said.

  “Why don’t you call me Luke? Or you can also try Mr. Stone.”

  Newsam grunted at that.

  Luke glanced out his window. It was a bright day, but the sun was already behind them. In a little while, as they moved further east, the sky would begin to darken. Iraq was a long way, so far that they’d have to stop in Germany to refuel.

  “Trudy?”

  She nodded, her eyes going wider than before. Luke had suddenly thrust her on stage. “Yes?”

  “You’re the intelligence officer, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Luke shrugged. “Well, we all know something about this case, but you probably know the most. I imagine you have some paperwork on all this, don’t you?”

  She nodded again. “Of course. Sure.”

  “Why don’t you fill us in?”

  There was a thick file folder on the seat next to her. She picked it up and opened it. On one side was a slim three-ring binder. On the other side was a sleeve holding loose documents. She opened the binder several pages from the beginning.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m going to assume that none of you have any prior knowledge of the events, the people involved, or the strategies we plan to take.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Luke said. “Boys?”

  “Good,” Swann said.

  “Let’s hear it,” Ed said. He eased back into his seat.

  “It’s a lot of information,” Trudy said. “It might take a little while.”

  Luke shrugged. “It’s a long flight,” he said. “We’ve got all the time in the world.”

  He listened for a bit as she went through her paperwork, describing for the others, and for Luke, the past and present of Edwin Lee Parr. Gradually, Luke drifted. He thought of Rebecca alone at her family’s country house, waiting for him to return.

  He could picture her standing on the back patio, framed by the sunset, her belly large with their child. He wanted, more than anything, for this trip to happen fast. He knew that past the eighth month, that baby could come anytime. Due dates were more like suggestions or guidelines than a hard and fast schedule.

  He thought of her eating dinner at her parents’ big stone house in the Virginia suburbs, maybe sleeping over. Probably sleeping over. Her parents were wealthy, and as far as Luke knew, had never worked a day in their lives. They didn’t think much of Luke, he knew. Elite special operations units did not impress them. People who joined the military were a different class of people from them, from their daughter, from their grandchild. He wasn’t sure what worried them more—that he would die during a deployment, or that he would come home alive.

  “…Luke?” Trudy had said.

  “Yeah, I’m sorry. What was that again?”

  Beside him, Ed Newsam released a sort of sneering laugh.

  “Do you want me to go over the operation plan?” she said.

  “Sure. Let’s hear it.”

  She riffled through some papers. She pointed at him. “Luke, your name is Edward King. They made your identity easy to remember. You’re thirty-two years old, the same age you are now. You were in the Seventy-fifth Army Rangers, which you w
ere, in fact, in. You used to work for Blackstone Corporation, and that’s how you came to be in Iraq, but they fired you for insubordination. Now you’re on your own, looking to make a score.”

  She turned to Newsam. “Ed, your name is David Dell. People call you DD. Also easy to remember. You’re twenty-five years old and you were once in the Eighty-seventh Airborne. You also worked for Blackstone, but your contract was not renewed. You and Ed King are now partners.”

  “Okay,” Newsam said. “That’s fine. But how do the big guy and I infiltrate?”

  Big guy. Newsam was trying to be a comedian. Luke didn’t like comedians.

  “Easy enough,” Trudy said. “There’s an informant. I don’t have his identity because that’s protected information. He was detained and arrested by a squad of Marines at a checkpoint outside of the city of Fallujah. He was riding in a Range Rover with three young Iraqi women. It wasn’t clear how an American came to be riding with three Iraqi women, but they were apparently in some distress. What little understanding I have of the situation is that the girls were teenagers, and he may have bought them, from their families or possibly from someone else, for a nominal amount of money.”

  “He’s a pimp,” Newsam said.

  Trudy was noncommittal. “I don’t have any information on what he was doing or intended to do. All we know is whoever he is, he was with Parr up until very recently. He is now in the custody of the CIA, and has been interrogated by Bill Cronin.”

  Luke inwardly winced at the idea of someone being interrogated by Bill Cronin. The guy who got picked up probably had a rough night with Bill. Well, good for him. People like Bill Cronin existed for a reason, and they didn’t come to see you unless you had strayed way off the path.

  “He is a cooperating witness now,” Trudy said, telling Luke something he already knew. Men in the custody of Big Daddy Cronin were invariably cooperating witnesses. If they were still alive, they were eager to cooperate. “He is on Parr’s team, and the plan is that he will take you back into Sunni-controlled territory and lead you directly to Parr.”