by Ben Coes
31
MIAMI, FLORIDA
The CIA jet landed at Opa-locka Executive Airport on the outskirts of Miami. He wasn’t quite drunk, but he was well on his way. For the last hour of the trip, Dewey swigged from the bottle of whiskey, staring out the window, saying nothing, trying to push all thoughts from his mind.
In truth, Dewey was still lucid enough to understand where he was and why he was there. He’d poured enough whiskey down his throat over the years to understand what his limits were. He knew they all thought he was inconsolable, perhaps even suicidal, but he wasn’t. He was angry. The last thing he felt like doing was getting the third degree by a brigade of CIA analysts. Actually, strike that. The last thing, the truly last thing he wanted to do, was to listen to people he barely knew express their condolences. He wanted solitude. He wanted to figure out what would come next. More than anything, he wanted revenge.
At the airport gift shop, where he’d stopped to buy a pack of Marlboros, Dewey caught the sight of Chip Bronkelman, the Boston billionaire who had offered him a job running security for his hedge fund. Bronkelman’s round, pudgy, friendly face smiled out from the cover of Forbes. Jessica had been the one to set up the job with Bronkelman. It would have paid more than a million dollars a year. Still, Dewey had turned it down. Now, as he looked at the cover of the magazine, his mind played a cruel trick on him. If he’d taken the job, he wouldn’t have been able to accompany Jessica to Argentina. Whoever had targeted him for assassination wouldn’t have tracked him to Estancia el Colibri. If he’d taken the job with Chip Bronkelman, Jessica would still be alive.
He climbed into a cab outside the airport, asking to be taken to a hotel.
“What hotel?” asked the cabbie.
“I don’t care,” said Dewey. “Any hotel.”
“Nice? Expensive? Economy? You want fleas and bedbugs, or caviar and champagne?”
Dewey made out the man’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
“Just take me to a fucking hotel.”
The cab lurched forward.
“There are more than two hundred hotels in Miami,” said the cabbie.
“Well, then you have a lot of choices, don’t you?”
“Bars,” said the cabbie. “I have a feeling you want to be near some bars.”
Dewey sat back, a slight grin spread across his face at the cabbie, but he said nothing.
“What brings you to Miami?” asked the cabbie.
“None of your fucking business,” said Dewey, looking at him with bloodshot eyes in the rearview mirror.
“All right, I’ll shut up.”
Fifteen minutes later, the cab pulled into the Delano Hotel, stopping as a valet grabbed the back door of the cab and opened it.
“The Delano,” said the cabbie, grinning. “Great place for assholes like you.”
Dewey did a double take as he reached into his pocket for some cash.
“Did you just call me an asshole?”
“You weren’t going to tip me anyway.”
The fare was thirty dollars and Dewey threw down an extra twenty.
“What’s that for?” asked the cabbie.
“For having a set of balls, unlike most people.”
Dewey shut the door and went inside. It was an old hotel but modern, having been redesigned and decorated with a meticulous array of uncomfortable-looking modern furniture, strange art, and odd photographs.
“Bonjour,” said a pompadoured greeter in a white button-down shirt. “Welcome to the Delano. Consider this your home away from home.”
Dewey did a U-turn. He walked down the block to a plainer-looking hotel, the National. There was no greeter, and he walked to the front desk. He paid in cash for three nights and registered under the name Tom Smith.
The room was on the tenth floor, overlooking South Beach. He looked at the clock by the bed. It was 6:00 P.M. He stripped down to his underwear, opened up the door to the small balcony, then ordered a steak from room service. He took a can of beer from the minibar and went out on the balcony. He sat down in one of the chaises and smoked a cigarette as the sky over South Beach turned purple with the coming sunset. The beach below was less crowded than he would have thought. He sat staring at the water and the beach, purging his mind of any sort of semblance of thoughts, until his dinner arrived.
After dinner, he went to the pocket of his jeans and removed the finger. He went into the bathroom and inspected it under the light. The finger was nearly black now, beginning to rot. He examined the fingerprint lines. Who would want him dead? Hector was right: maybe it was Iran. The dead man? Perhaps a mercenary. But who were the other two men?
He went to the minibar and removed a small bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He chugged it down, then went to the full-length mirror. He stared into his own eyes.
When Holly died, part of him died with her. Holly had been the only love Dewey had ever known. His first love. He didn’t know anything else, and it was pure. Losing her had been devastating. It had taken Dewey more than a decade to will the thought of her out of his head, ten long years of the hardest labor he’d ever experienced just to get over her. Dewey had found the most punishing work imaginable, as a roughneck on a succession of oil platforms, hundreds of miles offshore, first in the bitter winters of northern Europe, then in the miserable heat off the coast of South America. It had taken the punishing hell of hard labor to restore himself.
Jessica was different. He hadn’t been expecting it. She understood him, challenged him, accepted him. He’d grown to know her, then love her. They’d talked about different places to settle down. Jessica liked Portland, Maine, close enough to Castine for visits but also a city, with great restaurants. A place you could raise a kid. It wasn’t too late for that, they both knew. But there would probably be time enough for only one. Would it be a boy or a girl? They talked about names. For a girl, they liked the name Summer. For a boy, Hobey, after Dewey’s brother.
Now it was gone. It was destroyed. And the memories were like ashes in his mouth. They reminded Dewey that he was different. They fed his innermost fear, that he wasn’t meant to be happy, that he’d been chosen somehow to be tested in the cruelest of ways.
He stared at his reflection in the mirror.
“She was innocent,” Dewey said aloud, to no one.
Dewey swung his right fist against the mirror. He struck it once, but nothing happened. The next time, he swung harder. The mirror cracked, a spiderweb emanating out from the center of the glass, where he’d hit it. He looked at his fist. The knuckles were bloody where the skin had just been torn off. He punched again, harder this time. He felt glass enter his skin, then watched as a few pieces fell to the floor and shattered. He swung yet again, harder this time. The spiderweb disappeared as the wall of glass flashed silver, then cascaded to the floor at his feet, hundreds of shards of glass shattering around him.
He walked into the center of the bedroom, pulling pieces of glass from between the knuckles of his right fist. He got down on his knees, then put his hands down. He did a push-up, then another, and soon was moving up and down, up and down, up and down, his arms burning, sweat pouring off his chest and head.
Walk away, he thought. Leave it behind.
After fifty push-ups, he felt like throwing up. Blood dripped from his right fist onto the floor. He kept going. At a hundred push-ups, he did throw up, whiskey mostly. It poured from his mouth as he kept moving up and down. His arms burned like they were on fire.
He was back there, at the edge of it all, back where it began, in Ranger school, that long winter in Georgia. Nothing would ever be harder than Delta, but that first time, that pain that they drove you to, that first time only occurs once, and for Dewey it was Rangers. He threw up so many times that first week of Ranger school that he lost count. He got so used to it that he came to understand that beyond the throw-up, beyond the wall of pain that paralyzed you, came the other pain, the one that was from God, the one that told you that you alone could get to that point, you alone co
uld bear it, you alone were forged in steel strong enough to endure it.
Blood and vomit covered the floor now, and tears of pain dripped from his eyes as he drove himself further, first 130, then, at some point, 200 push-ups.
Dewey needed to go back to that time and place now. He needed to go back and find that inner steel he knew existed, the steel he would need to survive Jessica’s death. The steel he would stab into the heart of those who’d taken her.
He lost count sometime after 220 push-ups, passing out on the floor, lying in a pool of his own sweat, vomit, tears, and blood. He curled up into a fetal position, sobbing, and fell into a deep sleep.
32
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA
The phone started ringing precisely at midnight.
The only woman in the small Recoleta apartment was in bed. Francita Marti, a frail woman of eighty-four, let it ring for more than a minute. After that, she realized whoever it was wasn’t going away. It required nearly another minute to get out of bed, with her arthritis.
“Yes,” she said in a soft but annoyed voice. “Who is it? If this is one of those calls—”
“Good evening,” came the voice. It sounded distorted and loud, as if the man on the other end had a disability. She could not have known he was using a device to cloak his voice.
“Who is this?”
“It’s about your son.”
The woman became alert. She reached for the lamp next to the phone and turned it on. She found a pad and pen to write with. It didn’t happen often, but in matters having to do with her son, she knew to listen and to obey. After all, he was the top law-enforcement officer in all of Argentina.
“What about him? What time is it?”
“You must reach him immediately,” said the voice. “Tell him to call his friend Juan, in Mexico City.”
33
OVAL OFFICE
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON, D.C.
President Dellenbaugh stared out at a particularly bright red rose blooming at the edge of the Rose Garden, a few drops of dew clinging to petals that looked as if they’d been painted by Georgia O’Keeffe.
It was 6:15 A.M. and Dellenbaugh had been awake since four. He’d gone for a run on the treadmill in the private residence, trying to clear his mind, but he’d quit after only two miles.
Dellenbaugh turned and went back to his desk. For the third time, he attempted to read the front-page story, right-hand column, above the fold in The New York Times, announcing Jessica’s death.
U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR
TANZER KILLED IN ARGENTINA
(Córdoba, Argentina)—Jessica Tanzer, America’s top national security official, was killed yesterday while vacationing in Argentina. According to sources, Tanzer, 37, was shot to death at a remote ranch near the Andes …
Dellenbaugh had been president for only four months. Other than bringing in his own communications director, he hadn’t made any changes to the senior staff at the White House or any of the agencies. Starting from scratch, he wouldn’t have necessarily selected the exact same group, but he’d decided that, midterm, he wasn’t going to change a thing.
Some cabinet members, of course, had been more helpful than others. But no one had done more for Dellenbaugh than Jessica.
In her no-nonsense, smiling, confident way, she’d cut through the tangled, subterranean web of interlocking moving parts that was America’s national security infrastructure. She’d saved him time, so much time, by arguing, forcefully at times, when he was wrong.
Now she was gone.
He took the paper and held it up in front of him. He stared at the large color photo of Jessica that was spread across three columns, above the fold. The photo showed Jessica in the White House Briefing Room, conducting a press conference. She was wearing an elegant Burberry sleeveless dress, tan plaid, a bright string of pearls around her neck. Her auburn hair was brushed neatly back, parted in the middle, with her trademark bangs.
Dellenbaugh shut his eyes and tried to concentrate on not feeling overwhelmed by the loss, not to mention by the questions of who did it and why. He knew the implications were huge and that the country and the world—friend and foe alike—were now looking at the United States, and at him in particular, to see how Jessica’s death would be avenged.
The other question that ate at him: Who the hell would he get to fill Jessica’s shoes? The value of a president’s national security advisor was directly correlated to his or her willingness to be brutally honest, to be unafraid to hit the boss between the eyes with a proverbial two-by-four. The only other individual Dellenbaugh trusted to do this was Hector Calibrisi, but Dellenbaugh needed him across the river at Langley.
Dellenbaugh pushed his chair away. He got down on his knees, behind the desk. He leaned forward and folded his hands together in front of his face. He shut his eyes. And for the second time that morning, he prayed for Jessica.
When finally he opened his eyes, the door to the Oval Office was open. Hector Calibrisi was standing in the door.
“Mr. President,” said Calibrisi, “I apologize. Cecily wasn’t here—”
“Come in,” said Dellenbaugh, standing up, pointing at one of the tan chesterfield sofas in the center of the Oval Office.
Dellenbaugh and Calibrisi sat down across from one another. They shared a long, pregnant moment of silence.
“Time to get back on the horse?”
“Something like that,” said Calibrisi.
“From the Times article, it appears someone inside AFP is talking.”
“It’s unavoidable, Mr. President. The news is out. I don’t think it matters, though. This is not a Poirot mystery.”
“What do you mean?”
“We found a body.”
“When?”
“An hour ago. Lying on a hill, near a sniper nest.”
Calibrisi popped the latches of his briefcase. He removed a stack of photos. They showed a corpse, in various positions; prostrate on the ground, from the back, close-ups. The anterior of the man’s head was badly decomposed. Black and dark maroon from dried blood surrounded a crater at the back of the skull. The next photo showed what was left of the front of the man’s face, mostly gone now.
“He looks Asian,” said Dellenbaugh. “What does it mean?”
“We don’t know yet. My guess is, they were after Dewey. Perhaps Iran or someone affiliated with the Fortunas. The autopsy is happening as we speak. We need to know who this guy is before we draw any conclusions.”
“Where’s Dewey?” asked the president.
“He was dropped off in Miami last night.”
Dellenbaugh nodded.
“I sent some people down there to find him. From what the pilots say, he’s not doing well.”
“Can you blame him?”
“No,” said Calibrisi. “I know how I feel right now, and I can’t even imagine what he’s going through.”
“Did we bring the body back here for the autopsy?”
Calibrisi shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
“No, sir. AFP has jurisdiction.”
“Can they be trusted? Should I call President Salazar?”
“I don’t trust anyone,” said Calibrisi, “certainly not the Argentinians. That said, we’re getting complete access to the investigation. They’ve allowed us to have our forensics team at all stages of the investigation. We have guys in on the autopsy. I don’t trust them, but I also don’t see any reason for them to fuck around. And if they try to fuck around, we’ll know immediately.”
“What if Jessica was the target?” asked Dellenbaugh.
Calibrisi sat back, joining his fingers behind his head.
“First of all, regardless of whether they were after Dewey or Jessica, the fact is, our national security advisor was murdered. There needs to be payback. It needs to be significant. Significant enough to let the world understand that America will not tolerate the assassination of our leaders. In my opinion, once we determine who did this, we
have two choices. We can either make all of the evidence public, bring it to the United Nations, the media, et cetera, and let justice take its course. Or, we can take it off balance sheet.”
“Well, as far as I’m concerned, you do whatever the hell you want,” said Dellenbaugh, his voice inflecting. “America has to punch back hard. Hell, give me a gun and I’ll go do it.”
“That shouldn’t be necessary, Mr. President,” said Calibrisi. “But the offer is appreciated.”
34
CIA HEADQUARTERS
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
Calibrisi sat alone in his office, reading an intelligence report from his Moscow chief of station. But try as he might, he couldn’t concentrate.
He reached for a different file and stared for the umpteenth time at photos of Jessica, dead on the floor of the ranch bedroom. It hurt to look at them, but then he would return to the photos. Calibrisi felt like he was staring at a puzzle.
Usually, when he was stuck on something that didn’t feel right, something he couldn’t figure out, he called Jessica. But now he was alone. His mind felt disheveled and unorganized. He was exhausted.
There was a knock on his door.
“Derek Chalmers called twice,” his assistant, Missy, said, referring to the head of British intelligence. “He said it’s very important.”
“You mind getting me a coffee?”
“Sure.”
Calibrisi hit a speed-dial button on his phone.
“Hi, Hector,” came the proper British accent of Chalmers, head of MI6. “What took you so long?”
“Sorry. I just got your messages.”
“I heard what happened,” said Chalmers. “I’m very sorry. You have my thoughts and prayers.”
“Thank you.”
“I didn’t think it would happen so soon,” said Chalmers. “We should have known. I blame myself.”
“Should’ve known what?” asked Calibrisi.