Viking Bay

by M. A. Lawson

  48 | On the flight back to D.C. from London, Kay tried to sleep but couldn’t. She was exhausted from her and Jessica’s whirlwind, seemingly nonstop tour of London, but she couldn’t get her brain to stop spinning.

  Jessica, on the other hand, was having no problem sleeping, and she had a small smile on her face like she was dreaming about something pleasant. Kay thought she looked so incredibly young, and she couldn’t imagine the road that lay ahead of her, the years of studying, the exams, the constant pressure of life-and-death decisions. But if anyone could do it, she knew Jessica could. They’d had a great time in London, and she felt closer to the girl than she ever had.

  Kay had also reached a decision about Jessica and Brian and sex. Although she still thought sixteen was too young for sex, she knew she couldn’t stop Jessica—any more than her mother had been able to stop her when she was fifteen. Next year the girl would be seventeen and in college, and she’d have almost no control over her daughter’s life at that point. The best thing she could do was make sure that Jessica understood that she’d always be there for her, no matter what. And she would be.

  The reason she couldn’t sleep had nothing to do with Jessica, however. It was because she had two decisions to make—and one of those involved Eli Dolan. She wanted him back—and if she was going to get him back, she needed to make the first move, because it was obvious by now that he wasn’t going to. She still hadn’t apologized to him for suspecting him—and she still didn’t really feel that she owed him an apology. He may not have been guilty, but suspecting him had been logical.

  No, that was not the right way to approach him, talking about how she’d acted logically. That wasn’t going to fly. She was going to have to say that she was sorry; she wasn’t going to grovel—but she’d say she was sorry. She’d say that she should have listened to her heart instead of her brain, and in the future, she’d be more trusting and less cynical and not jump to conclusions so quickly and . . .

  Yeah, right. Anyway, when she got back she’d fly up to New York and talk to Eli.

  The bigger decision she had to make, even greater than the one involving Eli, was did she want to keep working for Thomas Callahan? She liked being involved in covert ops—that’s where the action was. And what she’d done recently with the North Korean scientist in Geneva, the Chechen kidnappers, Nathan Sterling, and Anna Mercer—she was good at those kinds of jobs. The problem was, she had no way to know if Callahan was telling her the truth. For example, she’d asked him once—this was a few weeks after the Afghanistan operation had fallen apart—if the lithium had really been intended for peaceful energy production. He’d acted surprised and said, “Yeah, of course, why wouldn’t you think so?”

  She’d responded by saying, “Because DARPA works on military applications, and I’m wondering if they were really planning to use the lithium to build a big, better, more powerful bomb.” She didn’t tell him that it was Jessica who had led her to ask the question.

  “Hell, we don’t need any more nuclear bombs,” Callahan had said. “And why would I lie about something like that?” Before Kay could respond to what Callahan clearly considered a rhetorical question, he said, “Although I was talking to a guy the other night—just a guy, not the president’s guy—and he was telling me how there are these asteroids out in space, zooming around, and a few of them have come pretty close to hitting the earth. Close being like a hundred thousand miles. Anyway, he was saying one day we might have to send a spaceship up with a great big bomb and explode it on an asteroid to knock it off course. Like that Bruce Willis movie.”

  Kay had thought, Bruce Willis, my ass, but she couldn’t tell if he was lying. And the answer to Callahan’s rhetorical question Why would I lie? was that he might think lying was in the country’s best interest and that a person at Kay’s level shouldn’t be told the truth because the truth needed to be carefully guarded. Which led to another issue: Exactly who was it who was deciding who needed to know the truth?

  Kay had come to the conclusion, like Barb Reynolds had said, that Callahan didn’t really work for the president. He had all these spidery connections to places like the CIA, the Pentagon, and Homeland Security. He had people who gave him computer advice and were able to monitor phone calls, which could mean the NSA, and he was able to get these agencies to do his bidding. Kay had never liked the checks and balances imposed on federal agencies by a virtually useless organization like Congress, but logic told her that someone had to do some checking or things could get totally out of control. Callahan—and whoever the hell he worked for or with—certainly thought they were doing the right thing when it came to protecting the country, but they were the only ones deciding what was right—and that could be dangerous.

  So what should she do? The smart thing would be to quit. Just walk away while she could, before she was indicted as Callahan’s codefendant or before she got killed. But then who would employ her and how would she support herself and her daughter?

  Oh, hell, she’d decide later, the next time she talked to Callahan. She had made up her mind about one thing: When she got back to D.C. she was going to make Callahan tell her whom he really worked for, and if he wouldn’t . . . Well, she’d cross that bridge when she came to it, and maybe tell Callahan where he could shove that nondisclosure agreement she’d signed.

  49 | This time Callahan met his partners—who still thought they were his bosses—at a horse ranch in northern Virginia, a lovely place with rolling green pastures that were enclosed by white wooden fences. There was a FOR SALE sign hanging on the gate that led to the house.

  Prescott met him at the door—her platinum-blond flapper’s hair contrasting absurdly with her sixty-year-old, perpetually frowning, wrinkled face.

  She greeted him with: “Why in the hell can’t you ever get to these meetings on time?”

  “I had to go to the emergency room,” Callahan said. “I thought I was having a heart attack.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” Prescott said.

  Callahan just shrugged in response to her comment, but he was telling the truth. He actually had thought he was having a heart attack, and he drove himself to a hospital, where a doctor told him it was indigestion, not a heart attack, and for God’s sake, lose some weight and stop smoking.

  Once again they gathered in the kitchen, where there was a table large enough for them to all sit together. Callahan wondered why they couldn’t sit in the living room and, by the way, have a drink while they chatted.

  The kitchen table was round, so Lincoln couldn’t sit at the head of it, although he probably figured that wherever he sat was the head. Prescott took a seat to Lincoln’s right. Grayson was already seated on Lincoln’s left-hand side; Grayson was wearing his usual tweed sport jacket, this one with patches on the elbows, but he had a tan, making Callahan wonder where he’d been. None of these people ever took vacations.

  “We’re not happy, Callahan,” Lincoln said. “We’re not happy at all that you disobeyed our order to terminate Anna Mercer.”

  When Hamilton had refused to kill Mercer, Callahan had no choice but to tell Lincoln that it had been his decision. He told Lincoln the same thing that Hamilton had said to him: that he wanted Mercer to suffer for what she had done and that a bullet to the head was really too good for her.

  “She’s been taken care of and she’s not going to talk,” Callahan said. “So is that why you wanted to meet today, to argue some more about killing Mercer?”

  “No,” Lincoln said, “but we will hold you responsible if she ever does talk.”

  Callahan didn’t know what hold you responsible meant—and he didn’t give a shit. What did they think they were going to do? Put a letter of reprimand in his personnel file—like he actually had a personnel file?

  “We’re also not happy with this new operative of yours, this Hamilton woman,” Prescott said. “We’ve been told you can’t control her.”

  Whoa!
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br />   “You’ve been told?” Callahan said. “Are you telling me that you’ve turned one of my own people and that person is reporting to you directly?”

  Prescott twitched her almost nonexistent lips—a movement intended to resemble a smile. “The way things have gone the last few months, we feel the need to keep closer tabs on you, Callahan.”

  “Well, I’m going to find out who this person is,” Callahan said decisively—he suspected it was Morgan—“and then I’m going to rip his nuts off.”

  Before any of them could comment on his turning Morgan into a gelding, he said, “And Hamilton’s a great operative. She’s a little hardheaded, but she gets the job done.”

  “We want her gone, Callahan,” Lincoln said.

  “I’ll think about it,” Callahan said—but he wouldn’t. “Is there anything else?”

  Before Prescott could erupt like a volcano and rain lava-like curses down upon his head, Grayson said, “Who’s going to replace Anna Mercer?”

  “I don’t know,” Callahan said, “and she’s going to be tough to replace.”

  What Callahan meant was that he’d never been a detail guy. He was a big-picture thinker, and Mercer had always taken care of the details. And he couldn’t replace Mercer with somebody like Hamilton; Hamilton had proved she could plan an operation, but she didn’t know Washington, D.C., and how all the various agencies worked together—or, more accurately—how they didn’t work together.

  “We’ll see if we can find you a replacement,” Lincoln said, pretending he was being helpful. “We have a couple candidates in mind.”

  “The hell you will,” Callahan said. “There’s no way you’re going to pick my staff.”

  They all just sat there staring at him for a couple of minutes as if their glowering faces would intimidate him. Finally, after a silence, Callahan said, “Well, if there’s nothing else, I might as well get back to work.”

  “There is something else,” Lincoln said. “Venezuela. That’s the main reason we wanted to see you today. With Hugo Chávez gone, we see certain opportunities opening up for us down there.”

  Which made Callahan immediately think of Kay Hamilton, who spoke Spanish like a native.

  “But Callahan,” Lincoln said, “I’m telling you right now that things can’t continue the way they’ve been. We’re not going to tolerate your flippancy and your insubordination any longer.”

  Callahan sighed. It was time for the speech. Again.

  “Guys,” he said, “anytime you don’t like the way I work, all you have to do is start using your own agents to do the things you ask me to do. But until you grow the balls to do that”—he said this looking directly at Prescott—“people like me and Kay Hamilton are the best option you’ve got.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The idea for Viking Bay came when I read an article about the 2007 U.S. Geological Survey that identified the large lithium deposits in Afghanistan. The funny part is that I had actually written the first draft of the novel when I came across James Risen’s 2010 article in the New York Times where he wrote about the Chinese attempting to bribe the Afghan minister of mines with thirty million dollars to obtain copper mining rights. I had no idea, until I read Risen’s article, that my fictional plot was so close to reality.

  I want to thank John and Jenny Matterface, longtime fans of my DeMarco books who live within walking distance of Viking Bay. John and Jenny graciously read and helped with the scenes set in the Viking Bay area. Any errors with regard to the U.K. scenes are mine and mine alone.

  I also want to thank Joe Lehnen of the Virginia Department of Forestry. Joe was kind enough to take the time to talk with me about the Devil’s Backbone State Forest and send me some maps. I picked Devil’s Backbone as the place where Anna Mercer and Nathan Sterling met simply because I liked the name. I did make up the campsite where Sterling and Mercer met.

  Last, I want to thank everyone at Blue Rider Press and Penguin associated with this book and the previous Kay Hamilton book, Rosarito Beach. In particular, I want to thank Eliza Rosenberry, whom I failed to acknowledge in Rosarito Beach, and who worked so hard on the publicity and book tour associated with that book. I also want to thank, once again, my editor, David Rosenthal, for all his work on Viking Bay. The plot of Viking Bay was significantly improved because of his astute comments.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  M. A. Lawson is a pen name for award-winning novelist Mike Lawson, author of Rosarito Beach and the nine novels in the Joe DeMarco series. Lawson is a former senior civilian executive for the U.S. Navy.

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