by Gordon Ryan
The bullet finally came to rest in the wall of the room directly across from the now fatally comatose man. His body remained seated on and bound to the cold, metal kitchen chair.
As the bullet completed its grisly task, the body of the former Richard Winslow slumped forward, held to the chair by the ropes that held him in his final hours of life. His arms remained tied behind him. Although his brain had ceased to function, his heart continued to spasmodically pulse, sending waves and waves of bright crimson blood gushing from the gaping head wound. The spreading pool of thick, slippery blood quickly expanded its grip on the dirty wooden and torn linoleum floor.
“Bill, get some gasoline from the garage.”
Sorenson was overwhelmed and sickened by what he had just witnessed, but was conditioned to comply with Walsh’s orders. He staggered out of the room. Reaching the front door and grabbing the doorframe with his left hand, Sorenson doubled over and retched, convulsively. His head buzzed from the loud report of the .357 Magnum revolver.
Nauseated and sweating profusely, Sorenson walked slowly over to the garage to find the five-gallon gasoline can. Nothing in his training had prepared Sorenson for this situation. His training had included dealing with death and even having to take a life, but that was all theoretical. He had never seen death and certainly not violent death. This was supposed to be a game, like a chess match. As an agent, his duty was to serve his rulers in their territorial goals. Goals not meant to be questioned. Goals to be sought blindly. His mission was to execute the plan. The plan and the metrics of its success were for others — the leaders, the planners, not Bill Sorenson.
Even so, Sorenson had found that this alien place was not as evil as his overlords had claimed. There was certain gentleness to the land, a certain sense of opportunity that he had never experienced at home. Home — that notion seemed more foreign each day that Sorenson lived his American existence. Sorenson had sensed changes in his attitude about this place and the effect those changes had on his every thought.
Sorenson had become increasingly concerned about these changes. He worried how they affected his mission and the life he had molded for himself in this strange world. Sorenson even had harbored a hope that the lessening of turmoil might give him an opportunity to fade into the fabric of American society. These people were not the monsters that he had grown up hating. So far, his duty to his own people had been a contest of will, strength, and intellect with the enemy — not violence. Was this death necessary?
Sorenson walked as if in a slow motion trance. He had to get to the gas can. He had to get it for Walsh, his group leader. He had to get the hell out of here.
Composing himself, Sorenson found the gasoline can and returned to the kitchen. By now twilight had overcome the scene and the kitchen was cast in dark shadows.
Walsh stood in the doorway, calmly smoking a cigarette, his pale blue eyes surveying the results of his handiwork. The corpse lay prone on the kitchen floor, having been cut free by Walsh. A pool of dark red blood continued to spread from his shattered skull.
Whatever secrets you may have carried, Sorenson thought, we will never know them now.
Walsh, upon hearing Sorenson re-enter the kitchen, abruptly turned to face him.
“Let’s get moving. For all we know, Winslow’s fellow gangsters may be searching for him. Let’s get this house burning, right now.”
Without comment, Sorenson mechanically splashed gasoline around the room.
Meanwhile, Walsh methodically wiped the revolver with a cotton handkerchief to smear any fingerprints or other identifying marks. A cigarette dangled from his mouth. Walsh then tucked the revolver under his belt. He would get rid of it later.
After he finished his task, Sorenson quickly walked out of the farmhouse.
Walsh lingered for another moment, making one last inspection of the room. He casually flicked his lighted cigarette into the kitchen as he walked out of the farmhouse toward the Jeep Grand Wagoner parked in the drive.
Sorenson, already in the driver’s seat, had the car started. After taking one last look, Walsh sat down, put on his shoulder belt, reached into his shirt pocket for the cigarette pack, took a cigarette out and lit it. Sorenson drove rapidly down the farm road. Through the rearview mirror, he watched the old, abandoned farmhouse explode in a fireball. Walsh sat calmly in the passenger’s seat, drawing on his cigarette. Neither man spoke.
About ten miles northeast of Mankato, they encountered volunteer fire trucks racing southward toward Mankato. This event provoked no comment. About twenty miles out of Mankato, Walsh quietly asked Sorenson to stop the Jeep. The empty field was marked by a sign that declared: “State of Minnesota — Department of Natural Resources — Protected Native Prairie Reserve.”
Walsh walked slowly across the native prairie to the river bluff amid the evening din of insect songs. He stood there for some time, quietly looking at the Minnesota River, which by now had turned from a sleepy creek to a modest river. Walsh took the revolver out carefully with his handkerchief and tossed it into the dark, muddy waters of the Minnesota. He calmly returned to the Jeep.
Walsh announced he would drive and Sorenson shifted over to the passenger seat. For the remainder of their trip from Mankato the two were quiet. Sorenson mostly looked out the passenger window into the night and the occasional passing light of a distant farmhouse.
Finally, the two reached the center of Minneapolis, the City of Lakes. Stopping at the corner of Hennepin Avenue and Lake Street, Sorenson disembarked without comment and faded into the shadows. Walsh turned right on to Hennepin Avenue and headed home.
1993: Call to Duty
0900 Hours: Friday, June 11, 1993: New York, New York
Fifty stories above the streets of New York, the dark, wood-paneled office projected the prestige and power of being a managing director of Franklin Smedley & Associates. Smedleys, as the firm was known on the Street, was one of the leading investment banks in the world. Beside the large mahogany desk and leather chair, the office had a comfortable leather sofa and armchair, mahogany coffee table, dark Chippendale side chairs, and expensive oriental lamps. The dark red, hand-tied Oriental rug on his floor had been handpicked on a trip to Istanbul. An oil painting of a delicate, blossoming dogwood branch stretched out across a brilliant blue sky sat on the wall directly across from his desk.
The dark mahogany bookcase and window ledges were crowded with Lucite, glass, and brass flotsam and jetsam: silent memorabilia of a long and successful investment-banking career. Though of nominal value, the odds and ends of plastic, wood, brass, and crystal represented the aspirations of many would-be fortunes.
The office was quiet, but for the soft hum of the ventilating system and the dull background noise of the city in perpetual motion countless stories below, the honking of a frazzled motorist or the loud noise of a muffler-less diesel truck roaring up the busy streets.
Even the Quotron computer on Mike’s brilliantly polished mahogany credenza made no sound as it chronicled the rise and fall of million-dollar fortunes on its green-lettered screen.
The banker was dressed in a dark blue cotton shirt with white stripes, starched white collar, and white French cuffs anchored by simple gold links, bright red paisley braces holding up custom tailored gray pinstriped suit pants, and a blue and red-patterned tie. He wore a gold school ring with a garnet stone from Mr. Jefferson’s School for Boys on his right ring finger.
The arduous climb to the top had its price, which the banker had paid, though it was not readily evident in his outward appearance, or even to him. He enjoyed his office, his position, and his attainments. He lived for the power and prestige that these things brought to him.
This morning, however, there had been a strange feeling, a gnawing sensation; a premonition that something was not right, that something had been left undone. He had shrugged off the feeling as simply lack of sleep.
The perennial SystemGraphon deal was in trouble, again, and he had endured too many late night negotiating sessions, tr
ying to put it back on track. The SystemGraphon, a “career deal,” seemed never to go away; it just wouldn’t close.
Aloysius Xavier Kang Sheng Liu, his thinning gray hair combed back over his head, was in charge of Project Finance. Aloysius. He had been given that cumbersome moniker by his diplomat father upon their arrival in the United States in 1950. Someone called him “Mike” on his first day in grade school and that nickname had stuck throughout the years.
His rise at Smedleys had been spectacular, marred only by the often-unquiet jealousy of Ivy Leaguers who could not understand how an outsider could attain such position. To them an “outsider” was anyone who could not claim to have grown up rich in Connecticut or Western New Jersey. To have been born into the right circles and to have received the proper education at Exeter or Choate, finished off with a sojourn at Harvard or Yale or, in the exceptional charity case, Wharton — in short: white and rich. Certainly, an outsider could never achieve high stature at Smedleys; that was only reserved for them. As one of a bare handful of Chinese-American investment bankers on Wall Street, Mike was not considered one of the “chosen” by his colleagues at Smedleys.
There were some senior members of the firm at Smedleys who believed that Mike was a Buddhist, despite his affiliation with the Lutheran church. Mike did nothing to disabuse them of this notion.
The abstract angst of his youth had been long buried in his investment banker facade. Mike had come a long way from the child dropped into this alien society so many years ago.
There was a knock on Mike’s door. An associate at Smedleys, Selby Eastwood, III, opened the door with his usual intensity and serious demeanor. “Mr. Liu, can I speak to you for a minute?”
Seated in a brown leather bound chair behind a large uncluttered dark mahogany desk, the ever-careful Mike put down his copy of The Wall Street Journal. With bold slashes of his felt-tipped pen, he had made anguished marks in red ink next to the right-hand column article titled, “SDI in Jeopardy, Congress Debates Rage Over Star Wars Budget.”
Annoyed at the interruption, Mike looked sternly up at the young face with the supercilious smile. Eastwood was carrying piles of computer paper. Of all the asinine associates I have to deal with, Mike thought.
Peering at the interloper over his half-lens reading glasses, Mike said, “Sure, come in, Eastwood.”
Eastwood, a second year associate in the investment banking division of Smedleys, normally worked with one of Mike’s colleagues. He wore rimless glasses, an affectation calculated to add maturity to his youthful demeanor. The glasses were a stark note of severity on an otherwise young face. As if to accentuate the severe look, Eastwood’s full head of brown hair was meticulously combed in place, shiny from the Brylcreem ointment he carefully applied each morning.
Eastwood’s manager was in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, attending investor meetings on the gasification project for three weeks. Consequently, Mike was stuck with the task of giving guidance to the young members of the staff, a loathsome task given the shallow superciliousness of the eager Ivy League business school graduate. Mike was happier leaving such details to others.
Taking off his reading glasses, Mike said without a trace of a smile, “Have a seat, Eastwood. What seems to be the problem?”
With a flourish, imitating what he thought was a grand gesture; Eastwood pulled up one of the heavy mahogany side chairs and placed a huge pile of papers and computer printouts of cash flows on Mike’s desk. Eastwood had once read that you could commandeer any situation by encroaching on the other person’s space. As a result, Eastwood’s pile of papers was now precariously perched on the corner of Mike’s desk. Mike looked with obvious disgust at this puny attempt at power politics.
“I’ve been working on the Fairington project; it’s a co-generation gas turbine plant with a district heating system as a steam host. The project would sell electricity to Phoenix Utilities. I’ve been working on the preliminary cash flows for the project. There is a dispute with some of the project participants over the construction period interest rate we should use. The financial adviser for General Steam wants to use a very conservative figure — an unrealistically conservative one. As you may be aware, Mr. Liu, the use of a conservative figure could put the project in jeopardy.”
Mike didn’t rise to this obvious put-down by the insolent pup. Of all the generally non-likable associates who worked at Smedleys, Mike particularly disliked Eastwood, a Choate/Harvard/Yale School of Management clone with his perfectly coiffured hair and brilliantly white-capped teeth. Mike didn’t need to understand his visceral dislike of Eastwood. He just knew he disliked him, which was reinforced each time he heard Eastwood’s whiny voice trying to sound superior.
“Who’s the financial adviser?”
“Terry Walters of Collins & Burns.”
“That asshole hasn’t had an original thought in twenty years. I thought Collins canned him after he fucked up the Alaskan telephone system privatization. How did we get hooked up with him?” said Mike with furrowed brow and a frown, but thinking to himself that this whelp couldn’t possibly recognize true quality even if he were hit on the head with it. Eastwood probably admired Walters because, after all, Walters was Harvard, ex-Groton.
Mike’s temper was legend on Wall Street and Eastwood felt ill at ease, despite his disdain of this interloper. Whether or not he believed, as did many of the young investment bankers at Smedleys that Mike did not deserve to be a managing director, Eastwood knew that Mike held the power to hire and fire. That balance of power in Eastwood’s mind offset his natural instinct to put the usurper in his place.
Biting his tongue, Eastwood quietly said, “He came with the deal, Mr. Liu.”
“Yeah, I guess you have to take them as you get them. Too bad, the project would go a lot faster without his idiotic posturing. Okay, what do you have?”
Mike put on his reading glasses and started to look over the cash flows and other papers. He was about to comment when the telephone rang. Ignoring the ring, Mike quizzed the sullen young associate about the Fairington project structure and how the team had picked the appropriate interest rate to use — the normal questions, routine questions that Eastwood should have known to have asked.
A knock on the door, Mike’s long-time secretary stuck her head in.
“Mr. Liu, there is someone on the phone and he insists on speaking to you.”
Mike looked up. He couldn’t understand why his secretary was forever barging in when she knew he was in a meeting. She didn’t seem to be able to screen calls like other secretaries he knew.
“Can you take a message and tell him I’ll call him in a few minutes? Can’t you see that I’m busy?”
“Sorry. He says it’s urgent and he needs to talk to you now.”
“What? Can’t you ever…” Mike shook his head, annoyed.
“He’s pretty insistent, Mr. Liu. I really did try.”
Mike sighed. “Okay, put him on.” He picked up the phone. “Hello, Mike Liu here.”
“Mr. Liu, this is Lieutenant Albert Twoomey, United States Navy. Sir, the star has fallen.”
The message struck deeply. Mike’s head jerked uncontrollably and perceptibly back at the words. His practiced calm demeanor was shaken.
His face tightened — instinctively, his hand clenched the handset, knuckles whitening. His field of vision narrowed into a long, dark tunnel. He felt his world starting to cave in. His feelings of anger at being interrupted abruptly changed to dark and foreboding worry. Mike had hoped never to hear those words, but knew someday he would. This was his worst dream, the recurring one that had never gone away.
Thoughts, emotions, theories, questions, memories, hopes, and morbid fears all jumbled together. God, he hoped it wasn’t catastrophic. His thoughts went back twenty years.
In reality, it was almost twenty-six years. Time had passed so quickly. Even though Mike left the agency in the seventies, he had occasionally been called upon for special projects, but this was different. This was what ha
d started it all.
I wonder what Bob McHugh is thinking, thought Mike. Robert McHugh was Mike’s commanding officer during those initial years and had remained Mike’s friend and mentor ever since. McHugh had risen in the hierarchy of CSAC and, as a Rear Admiral, was currently Chief of Operations, stationed in Newport News, Virginia.
Whatever happened had to have been big, perhaps monstrous. The nature of the words spoken by the caller meant nothing less. The code phrase, “the star has fallen,” meant that something had happened at one or more of the observation sites and that Mike was being activated immediately. CSAC agents simply disappeared when activated. If all went well, life could be re-entered, often with elaborate cover fabrications as to the events of the intervening months or, in some cases, years. Sometimes, there was no return and loved ones were given no explanation. McHugh had the power to activate any CSAC agent, retired or not, and he had just activated Mike.
Mike was lost in thought. The worried look on the Mike’s face surprised even Eastwood, despite his barely disguised contempt for Mike. Can’t show emotion right now, thought Mike, as he struggled to control to control his emotions. His face quickly regained its Asian passiveness.
Cupping the speaker of the phone with the palm of his hand, Mike focused his attention coldly on Eastwood. “We’ll have to cut this discussion short, something has come up. Why don’t you talk it over with the guys in private placement? I’m sure that they can give you some good arguments to use in this situation, seems pretty straightforward.”
The abrupt manner of the dismissal caught Eastwood off guard. Like him or not, Mike was smooth and this abrupt change of character was unsettling. Eastwood rose from his chair, quickly gathered the papers from Mike’s desk, and backed out toward the door. “Thank you, Mr. Liu. Shall I close the door?”
“Please.”
Mike quietly watched as Eastwood exited and the door to his office latched with a soft click.