Bodily Harm: A Novel

by Dugoni, Robert

  “I guess that’s why they run the races,” he said, “to see which horse actually wins.”

  GEORGE BUSH CENTER FOR INTELLIGENCE

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  JENKINS’S ESCORT LEAD him through the glass doors beneath the concrete overhang into the drab marble foyer with the circular emblem of the CIA embedded in the floor. The entrance to the Old Headquarters Building, apparently so named because there was now a New Headquarters Building, hadn’t changed, though there were more gold stars on the north wall, one for each CIA officer killed in the line of duty. Jenkins counted eighty-nine. As in the past, not all of the officers’ names were revealed, since doing so might still jeopardize the lives of others. Inscribed on the south wall above the bronze bust of Major General William J. Donovan, the first director of the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor to the CIA, was a passage from scripture, John 8:32.

  AND YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH,

  AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE.

  Curley Wade’s assistant scanned Jenkins’s visitor’s badge through a computer and Jenkins was allowed entry through turnstiles like those found at a subway station. He walked down a hall bustling with people. Halfway down the hall his escort pushed open a glass door to the courtyard patio between the old and new buildings. No longer having security clearance, Jenkins could not meet Wade in his office, but the man was not difficult to find. He was one of only two black men in the courtyard, Jenkins being the other, the sun shining atop Wade’s bald head. “Curley” was a nickname that had apparently been passed down multiple generations, regardless of the amount of hair atop that particular generation’s head.

  Wade stood from a red metal picnic table and removed his sunglasses, considering Jenkins with an uncertain stare. “Charles fucking Jenkins. I wouldn’t believe it was actually you until I saw you in the flesh.”

  Jenkins smiled, shaking the man’s hand. “Yeah, I guess it’s been a while.”

  “‘Been a while’? I thought you were dead. After Mexico City you dropped off the face of the earth.”

  Jenkins had first met Wade during his orientation to the Agency, studying its organization, and its history. It was likely that the Agency had paired the two men together, given they were both African American and racism and intolerance remained prevalent. After ten weeks Jenkins was sent to a remote training center in the West Virginia hills, where for six months he learned, in essence, how to become a “spook.” The culmination was a six-week probationary period running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, in which he was to showcase what he had learned. When it concluded, a “murder board” gave Jenkins high marks. From there most of the case officers were sent for additional paramilitary training, but because Jenkins had received that training in the Special Forces, the Agency sent him to Mexico City.

  “I needed to get away and deal with some of my demons.”

  “Well, you haven’t changed much. Still built like a friggin’ tank.”

  Jenkins patted his stomach. “I got a little bit more fuel in the tank I’m afraid.”

  “Don’t we all? You want to get some chow? We got everything you could want, even a Starbucks.”

  “I get enough of that in Seattle. I’m good.”

  The operations officer at the Mexico City Station, Wade became Jenkins’s case officer. It had been Wade who assigned Jenkins to work with Joe Branick to infiltrate the village in the mountains of Oaxaca, where a young boy was giving sermons so riveting the peasants had begun to rally around him and call him Mexico’s “savior.” At a time when the Saudis were threatening to cut off the flow of oil to the United States, or raise the price to be prohibitively expensive, Mexico, with its billions of barrels of oil offshore, had become a valuable alternative. The United States government could not risk any potential disruption to its relationship with the Mexican government in power, or to its ability to again gain access to Mexico’s oil. The boy was deemed a threat to the stability of the government and an order was given to eliminate that threat. That boy turned out to be Ephraim Ybaron, who managed to survive and whom Joe Branick would hide in California’s foster care system as David Sloane. Wade had sworn that he had no knowledge of the subsequent operation that had led to the massacre of the residents of that village, including Sloane’s mother. At the time Jenkins wanted to believe him, but whether Wade knew or didn’t know became irrelevant. Jenkins was done, finished with the whole business.

  They sat across from each other. A breeze blew through the courtyard, rustling the leaves of an oak tree and giving a short reprieve from the humidity. Behind Wade water trickled down a stone sculpture that Jenkins had never seen before but looked like four encoded panels. Wade saw him considering the panels.

  “Someone’s figured out three of the four,” he said. “But don’t bother with the fourth. Someone else determined there’s an error.”

  “That must have been fun.”

  “We had people pulling their hair out for weeks. Not me of course.” He turned back to Jenkins, “So, what happened to you? Where’d you go?”

  “Seattle,” he said, as if he had just moved to a different city. “A little island about an hour to the north. A farm.”

  “You? The boy from New Jersey?”

  Wade was no longer the young man with the unblemished skin and chiseled features that had been a thirty-year snapshot unchanged in Jenkins’s memory. The years and twenty pounds had reshaped his features. His face was rounder, his nose more prominent. A scar remained partially hidden beneath his right eyebrow.

  “I see you’re still in recruiting,” Jenkins said. Wade’s office was in the Office of Personnel, which was under the auspices of the deputy director of operations.

  “Not the kind of recruiting that you’re thinking of. I’m a desk jockey now. I hire secretaries, though we can’t call them that anymore. I’m a lot more familiar with ADA and the Department of Labor and Industry than I am with the shit you and I used to deal with.”

  Again, Jenkins didn’t know if Wade was telling the truth, but again it didn’t matter. “You still have connections in that world?” he asked.

  Wade put his elbows on the table. His eyebrows inched together. “You interested in jumping back in?”

  Jenkins laughed. “No. Nothing like that.” He got serious. “I have a favor to ask. I might not have any right to ask it, given how I left, but I need to ask it anyway.” The fact that Jenkins had just disappeared, rather than have his cover “rolled back,” had probably caused Wade some headaches. But Jenkins had never breached his lifetime secrecy agreement.

  “If I can help, I will. You know that.”

  Jenkins handed him a copy of the photograph Sloane had taken from the envelope when the two detectives came to the hospital.

  “This is a bad guy, a sociopath. I need to know his name and how to find him.”

  “Why not the police?”

  Jenkins had anticipated the question. “It’s personal,” he said. “And the police won’t have the resources to find this guy.”

  “Mercenary?”

  “Maybe. He’s a professional, well trained, I have a hunch he served.” Jenkins knew that no one kept records quite like the United States military and hoped his hunch was accurate.

  Wade sat for a few moments, saying nothing. Then he asked, “How personal?”

  “He killed a pregnant woman in cold blood.”

  “Not your wife . . .”

  “No, but someone who meant a lot to me.”

  Wade nodded. “How long are you in town?

  “As long as it takes, Curley.”

  ONE UNION SQUARE BUILDING

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  SLOANE CLOSED HIS office door and threw the cane across the room, clenching and unclenching his fists as he paced the carpeting. The door pushed open, nearly hitting him. Carolyn entered, holding a mug of coffee. Sloane stopped his pacing but apparently not soon enough.

  “Well, caffeine is definitely out of the question,” she said. “You want somet
hing stronger.”

  Sloane made his way to his chair, falling into it. His leg throbbed.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “My leg hurts,” he said.

  “I’ll bring you some ibuprofen.” She pulled the stack of documents from the out-box on his desk and left him alone, shutting the door behind her.

  Sloane took out the prescription bottle from his top desk drawer, nearly pulled off the cap, then reconsidered. The pills would ease his pain but not his frustration; Fitzgerald had remained arrogant, and Sloane knew that without a plaintiff it was unlikely Kendall would react to his threats. If Barclay Reid was as competent as her reputation suggested, she would advise Fitzgerald that a barking dog was not to be feared until it actually bit someone. Without the McFarlands, Sloane was barking, but he had no bite.

  Could you?

  Eva McFarland’s final question haunted him. That was always the issue when it came to doing the right thing. People often asked more of others than they asked of themselves, and in this instance Sloane had asked Eva McFarland a hell of a lot. He had not lost a child, but he understood what it meant to love someone so much you would rather die than lose them.

  THE WAVE HIT the boat so fast Sloane never even saw it coming.

  He and Jake had taken the boat out early that morning after Jake had read about a run on king salmon in the Sound, although farther out beyond Vashon Island, which had been the limit of Sloane’s comfort zone driving the boat. He relented because he did not want to disappoint Jake, and only after checking the weather forecast, which called for overcast skies and a chance of light rain. At the time, Sloane was not yet educated on Northwest weather and did not know that, as with so many forecasts in the Pacific Northwest, the weatherman would be wrong. It seemed that with Seattle being located so far north, it was susceptible to the rapidly changing weather patterns coming down from Alaska, making forecasts often no better than a dart throw.

  The weather began to change for the worse just after three in the afternoon. Dark clouds rolled in quickly, and the temperature dropped. Light rain became a steady downpour that turned to hail and strong winds, agitating the Sound into a froth of whitecaps and foam. As Sloane struggled to control the twenty-one-foot boat against the wind, the choppy waters, and the current, he never saw the large wave until too late. Though he tried to correct into its impact, he could not steer the boat quickly enough. The wave hit the bow of the boat at an angle and lifted it from the water. Sloane had remained upright only because he managed to hang on to the steering wheel. With trepidation, he turned his head to make sure Jake was okay but instead realized his worst fear. Jake was not in the boat.

  His heart leapt in his throat, and he let go of the steering wheel, spinning around.

  “Jake! Jake!”

  An orange bob in the water was rapidly becoming smaller when another wave hit the boat and knocked Sloane off balance to the floor between the seats. By the time he got back to his feet the orange bob had become a speck.

  His heart hammering in his chest, he turned the boat around quickly and hit the throttle, but with the surging waves tossing the propeller in and out of the water, steering the boat was nearly impossible. Jake had his hands raised over his head, waving frantically, the life vest pushed up under his chin. As Sloane approached he slowed, realizing another problem—getting the boy back into the boat would be no easy task. Sloane could not cut the engine entirely because he would lose all power and be at the mercy of not only the waves crashing against the boat but also the wind.

  He pulled the boat alongside Jake and ripped off the seat cushions in search of rope. The wind caught one cushion and hurled it fifteen feet into the air before it fell and tumbled across the waves out of sight. Sloane pulled out a purple nylon ski rope and quickly untangled it while trying to keep the nose of the boat into the wind and the waves and not get pushed too far from Jake. He fastened one end of the rope around a cleat, then went back to the wheel and pressed down the throttle, making a horseshoe around Jake. He tossed the line, but the wind took it and pushed it well out of Jake’s reach. Sloane left it in the water and this time made another pass so that the rope would come to Jake, as if he were a downed water-skier. But with the wind, rain, and whitecaps the rope was hard to distinguish. Sloane could see Jake frantically looking for it, slapping at the water.

  “Get it, Jake. Grab it.”

  But the boy missed it.

  Sloane had no choice but to circle again, all the while knowing that Jake was freezing in the forty-five-degree water. He could tell from the expression on Jake’s face as he drove away that the boy was now panicked. He brought the boat around again, the waves tossing it up and down like a cork. This time he brought the rope closer and Jake snatched it. Sloane centered the throttle to neutral.

  Afraid that Jake would not be able to hold on to the rope as Sloane pulled him through the water to the boat, Sloane shouted out to him, “Tie it around you,” but the wind and the rain swallowed his voice.

  Sloane mimicked the action of tying the rope around his waist while trying to remain upright with the waves jostling the boat.

  “Tie it around you.”

  Jake tied the rope around his body and Sloane tested it with a yank. The rope held. He pulled hand over hand, Jake swimming for the boat as he did, but it was still like pulling a tire through mud. Making things worse, the waves continued to rock the boat, knocking Sloane off balance and dousing him with foam. He could get little traction, and the boat was taking on more and more water.

  His arms ached by the time he pulled Jake to the side of the boat, reached down, and yanked him out of the water by his life vest. The boy was shivering from the cold and shock, but Sloane had little time to console him. The waves were growing ever bigger. He put him in the passenger seat and throttled forward, turning the boat back on course, praying they’d make it back to Three Tree Point.

  When they got within site of their beach Sloane saw a tiny, solitary figure standing on the bulkhead. Tina looked out from under the hood of her blue Gore-Tex jacket, leaning into the wind and rain. She would later tell him that she had stood there for almost an hour, cell phone in hand, hoping to see them or the Coast Guard, whom she had called.

  Sloane didn’t bother to tie up at the buoy. He threw Tina the rope and beached the boat on the gravel, unconcerned about the damage that might cause. As Tina tied the rope to a ring cemented in the bulkhead, Sloane helped Jake to the shore. Tina rushed to them, hugging them both, crying, unable to speak, not having to do so. Clutching Tina and Jake tight, Sloane knew what he had almost lost and now realized what he could not live without. And with that knowledge he came to understand, for the first time, what it truly meant to love and to be loved.

  THE FIRST NIGHT in the hospital after Charles Jenkins had told him Tina was dead had been the longest of his life. The succeeding nights did not get any shorter. People who said time heals all wounds were wrong. The days became a week, and the week an emotion-deadening month, but he still felt the pain as fresh as that first night, and every morning bore the same reality—there was nothing he could do to change it. For all his skill and talent, he had no control over the one thing that could bring color back into his world and make him feel again. He could not bring back Tina. Now he feared he was about to let her down all over again, unable to bring those responsible to justice, and the frustration that wrought was almost paralyzing.

  Carolyn knocked and opened the door, looking perturbed. “Did you schedule an appointment you didn’t tell me about?”

  Sloane shook his head. He had no appointments, not today, not tomorrow, not for the rest of the month. He was focused on just two tasks, taking down Kendall Toys and exacting revenge on the man who had killed his wife.

  “Well, Michael and Eva McFarland are in the lobby and they asked to speak to you.”

  Sloane sighed. Michael had probably come to give Sloane the remaining piece of mind that Eva had not unleashed on him. He deserved it. “Ask them to wait in
the conference room,” he said.

  THE MCFARLANDS STOOD near the windows with their backs to the door. The two cups of coffee Carolyn had set on the conference table remained untouched, and the strap of Eva’s purse remained around her forearm. They didn’t intend to stay long, probably just long enough for Michael to ask Sloane where he got the nerve.

  Sloane knocked to get their attention as he walked in. Michael stepped forward, though not with the assertiveness Sloane had anticipated. Eva hesitated, but her husband wrapped an arm around her shoulder. She looked as she had many days in court, eyes puffy red, skin pale. “We wanted to talk with you about the check.”

  It would have been standard procedure upon receiving the $3.2 million judgment from Dr. Douvalidis’s insurance carrier for Carolyn to deposit the check in Sloane’s trust account and cut the McFarlands a check, less Sloane’s fee and costs. “Did Carolyn not send it?”

  “No, we got it.” Michael had trimmed his goatee since Sloane last saw him. It was a shade darker than his brown hair with strands of gray at the chin. “That’s what we wanted to talk to you about.”

  Sloane gestured for them to take seats at the conference room table. Eva opened her purse and pulled out a white envelope Sloane recognized to be his firm’s stationery. Then she slid it across the polished surface.

  Sloane considered it before looking back up at them. “I don’t understand. Is there something wrong? Is it the wrong amount?”

  Eva’s voice cracked. She paused to clear her throat and let her emotions pass. Tears pooled again. “I’m so sorry, David. I’m so sorry for those things that I said to you about not having lost someone you love.”

  He put up a hand. “No. You have nothing to apologize for. I never should have put you in that position. It was wrong of me. You asked me if I could do it, and now . . . well, I know my answer.”

  “But that’s really the point, isn’t it,” Michael said. He gestured to his wife. “I mean, that’s what we talked about when I got home. Eva told me you came to the house and what you told her, about that other family. No one should have to make that decision. No one should have to go through what we’ve gone through. Austin never had a chance. I mean, no one knew there could be a danger. You don’t go to the store and buy your child a toy and think that it could kill him. You think that if it’s there, if it’s on the shelf, then it has to be safe, right? I mean there are agencies that are supposed to check those things, aren’t there? So no one could have prevented what happened to Austin because no one knew.” McFarland paused, as if to catch his breath. “But now it’s different. Now we know that toy is dangerous. And, well, we couldn’t live with ourselves if something happened to another child and we knew that we could have, maybe, prevented it.”