Recon

by David McCaleb

  He leaned away from the garlic stench. “But I don’t drink too much.”

  Sato’s cheeks rose, and she cackled a laugh. “Not everyone with PTSD is an alcoholic.”

  Fine. Whatever. “So how do I fix it?”

  A black cat jumped upon the windowsill outside. The angle of the sun cast its shadow as large as a mountain lion upon the carpet. Sato stepped behind the desk again. She stood on the stool’s footrest and leaned onto the desk, arms braced as if doing a push-up. “You’re not a machine. There isn’t a quick fix. No magic solution. It’s different for everyone. But for you the first step is time off. A vacation. And I don’t mean Disneyland. You need time to be bored. To watch the sun go down. Time for your head to process what’s transpired, instead of being constantly distracted.”

  Red raised a hand. “Now’s not a good time. We’ve got—”

  “For me, either,” Lori jumped in. “We’ve lost ground at work. Maybe in a few months we could do it.”

  The shadow of the cat’s tail swished like a whip crack across Sato’s desk; then it leaped from the frame, as if to an adjoining office’s balcony. The psych’s eyes were slits. “Major, here’s the sitrep. You’ve started to exhibit signs of PTSD. The path to recovery can be long, but if you don’t start on it now, it just gets longer. Most operators, unless they take action, are in divorce court in six months. Within a year I have to declare many unfit for duty.”

  Wow. Maybe he didn’t like her direct approach after all.

  She flexed a pencil between thumbs. It snapped. “Funny, don’t you think, how soldiers can be so dogmatically decisive when bullets are flying, but can’t bring themselves to make basic life changes like the one before you now?” She pointed the splintered instrument at him as if it were a pistol. “Get away together. Don’t take your work phone. Don’t check email. Don’t even tell anyone where you’re going.” She patted her chest. “Doctor’s orders.”

  Just then, country rap music blared from Lori’s black Coach purse. Ho ya baby! You drive me crazy! “What the—” she snapped, then yanked the bag off the floor, pulled out a phone, and lifted it to her ear. She plugged the other with a finger. “We’ll be right there. Thank you,” she said, then tapped the red button on the screen. Her mouth hung open. “Penny just slapped Jenny at school.”

  That made no sense. Penny was as gentle and tolerant as a kitten. And Jenny was her best friend.

  “Teacher said she’d pulled out a chunk of Jenny’s hair by the time they were separated.”

  Sato scribbled a note with the short pencil. “Has Penny done this before?”

  Lori frowned, then stood and slung the bag over a shoulder. She grabbed Red’s wrist. “Let’s go. We’ll finish this later.”

  Sato knelt on her stool, as if trying to appear taller. “You need time off. Both of you. Then we can talk about what’s next. Make a decision. Now.”

  Red stood. Lori stepped past him toward the door, but he pulled her to a halt. “School’s out in two weeks.”

  The edges of her eyes glowed red. “No time right now.”

  “No shit. Me, either. But, if this is step one, let’s do it.”

  Lori gripped the doorknob. Her fingers trembled. “OK. In two weeks, once school is out, we’ll get away. Now, come on!”

  * * * *

  Martina Banderas wheeled a gray plastic trash cart down a narrow hall of Westwood Psychiatry. The carpet had recently been replaced. The playdough scent of vinyl adhesive still hung heavy in the air. She’d vacuumed earlier and the pile still looked new as— Oh, Saint Zita! Dark coffee had stained the rug outside an office. She bent and rubbed at the spot with bare fingers. Still moist. Good. She could spray it with cold water and dab the blemish up.

  She straightened, then did a double take when she spotted the name etched into the door’s glass. Dr. Christian Sato. A chill shivered her neck, just like the ones she used to get whenever she heard the voice of her manipulative aunt Florencia. Each time the janitor saw Sato’s name, she heard it as if spoken in the annoying high-pitched voice of her dead aunt. The doctor spoke praises like honeysuckle to clients but flashed scorn to the help.

  A dim light shone from behind the pane. Better knock to let the doctor know Martina needed to run the carpet cleaner. A tirade came any time Sato was working late and Martina made too much noise. She always had to bite her cheek to keep from laughing out loud at the Japanese lady.

  She rapped on the glass timidly. No answer. She tried again, this time harder, the pane rattling in the frame. Still nothing. She cracked the door. “Señorita Doctor Sato?” The light on the baby-puke-colored metal desk cast a warm glow over a broken pencil and pad of paper.

  Her heart quickened. This would mean an extra hundred dollars!

  “It’s just a way to get a message to a good friend without his wife knowing,” Sato had told her three years earlier, blinking both eyes, as if attempting to wink but unsure how it was done.

  Martina stalked inside, fearing Sato might actually not yet be gone. Another peek around, then to the desk. On the pad was written a number 3. Nice! Two months had passed since Sato had last requested a delivery, but location number three was Martina’s favorite. She was to get a French manicure from the Vietnamese nail place next to Kroger supermarket, then “pay” with only a sticky note Sato would leave in the trash can.

  She snatched up the wastebasket, lifted out a crisply folded pink square, and slipped it into her cleaning apron’s chest pocket. She stepped over the coffee stain and dumped the rest of the contents into the cart.

  Martina had tried to figure out which of the nail stylists Sato was seeing. But all the men there seemed so young.… She’d always been careful not to pry, but—really? That old lady and one of those Asian hunks? Her fingers drummed against the empty can. She reached in her pocket, pulled out the note, and unfolded it.

  Package headed out in two weeks. Pick up. Discard both.

  Chapter 2

  Greenwood Park

  Detective Matt Carter sucked in a deep breath and cinched his fall-arrest harness chest strap. The new nylon webbing was stiff, but he gripped the belt’s tail with both hands, flexed thick biceps, and yanked again, edging it one notch tighter. He’d managed to score a worn pair of canvas Carhartt jeans at a hospice thrift store last week. Glancing at his reflection in the passenger window of the GMC boom truck, he looked like a real electrical contractor sporting a yellow hard hat, elbow-length rubberized gloves, and thick work boots. Not his typical Brooks Brothers staples, this stuff.

  He’d parked the vehicle and chocked the tires on a brown gravel lot at Greenwood Park, outside Woodbridge, Virginia. Leaves on the tall hardwoods fluttered in a warm breeze. A child’s distant laugh mingled with the buzz of cicadas, but it was still early enough that the lawns and athletic fields were mostly empty.

  The door of the vehicle displayed Hart Electric with a cartoon Dalmatian holding a lightbulb. If anyone were to do an Internet search for the company, they’d find a crappy-looking website with broken links and a “Contact us” form that didn’t work—just what one would expect from a small-town business. But, if they called the phone number, the CIA had forwarded it to the Det where a geek named Jamison was sipping chocolate Yoo-hoo, waiting for the phone to ring. Carter shook his head, picturing the nerd in a dim com room, his lime-green Chuck Taylors propped atop the metal desk. The guy was so socially inept he couldn’t get to first base on prom night.

  Senior Master Sergeant Nolan Grind cinched laces on a black boot, propped on the truck’s diamond-plate bumper. Tiny sweat droplets beaded on his smooth scalp. He pointed to Carter’s getup. “Looks like a parachute harness, minus the chute,” he said. Plump eyes bulging like olives, dark skinned with close-cropped beard and round belly, Grind had been with Air Force Office of Special Investigations, OSI, for fifteen years. They’d recently demoted him to classroom teaching escape and evasion at Q
uantico when Carter had come looking for an experienced detective a few months back. Eager to secure his own escape from “white-collar scurvy,” as he’d called it, the man had proven adept at fieldwork.

  Carter slipped wraparound sunglasses over his eyes. “Wouldn’t know. I was intel for the few years I was in the Navy. Never jumped from an airplane. No desire.” He tilted his head back and studied a brushed aluminum lamppost looming over them. There were forty of the poles scattered across the grounds. “Think we need to plant at least two cameras on the lights around these picnic tables. This place is huge. If you were meeting a handler here, where would you go?”

  Grind pressed a broad, flat palm to his forehead, shading eyes from morning sun. He turned toward the parking lot and pointed. A twenty-something female in black running pants and skintight racer-back top was bobbing down an earthen trail next to it. “Depends. Just runners here now. They’re not meeting till this evening, so the park will be different. Next come the moms and kids after breakfast. Some dads will wander in before dinner to throw ball. But by evening, it’ll be empty. Folks gone home to eat. Some bums might be out. I’d say they’ll park in that lot, just sit at one of those picnic tables. Won’t be anyone around to eavesdrop, so—might as well.”

  Carter nodded. Not knowing the exact location of the meeting within the park, they had to cover all the most obvious spots. Months of electronic eavesdropping and surveillance were coming together this evening. Yesterday he’d intercepted an unsecured phone call between Senator Moses and a known Mossad agent, arranging a meeting at this park at 7:00 p.m. Within an hour he’d pushed through approval from the National Reconnaissance Office to task a thermal imaging satellite to monitor the area. They could track the men’s position wherever they wandered.

  Carter glanced around. Tall oaks in the distance leaned in a firm breeze. In another direction empty swings rocked, as if occupied by ghost children, stirred by the same gusts. Across from the playground a soccer field thick with blooming dandelions rippled as invisible fingers stroked its fuzzy yellow coat.

  Clear skies now, but the Weather Channel predicted heavy, low clouds in the evening. So now satellite imaging had been nixed. And at the beginning of July there was still over an hour of daylight left at seven, so they couldn’t hide in the shadows and trail the pair with a microphone. The only thing left to do was mount as many cameras as possible and stick mics under every table and bench.

  The senator was wily; he knew exactly what he was doing. A dirty prima donna around whom the world stage revolved, in his own head. Carter’s investigation had linked him to money laundering and intelligence leaks, not the least of which had nearly killed Red last winter. And the connections Carter had uncovered showed the man’s infidelity stretched back decades, possibly even when he was still under the employ of the CIA. And like any lie, the scope of these breaches had grown. Now something huge was in play. It included a list of the identity of key military operators and the ops in which they’d participated. Moses was a traitor and his treasonous actions were a threat to national security. But it seemed only a portion of a larger conspiracy, and thus far Carter had only uncovered the fringes. Plus, all his evidence was circumstantial. But he was a patient hunter. He’d bagged big game before, and would pull it together again…somehow.

  He stepped onto the bumper, climbed into the truck bed, and gripped the rim of a white fiberglass man-bucket. In a single smooth motion, he swung into the cherry picker. He swatted his harness’s snap hook onto a D ring, securing himself to the hard point. Then, he imagined himself perched high above, working on the light. His stomach knotted, and he braced himself on the lip.

  Sergeant Rick Mather stretched out one thin arm to lift a door on the side of the utility bed, rummaging like a squirrel through screwdrivers and wrench sets. Mather had been assigned to the Det along with Grind, a yes-man. A gopher. But what the kid lacked in know-how he sure made up in eagerness.

  Carter slipped a com bud into one ear and flipped the tiny switch next to his lobe. “Com check.”

  Grind, then Mather, gave a thumbs-up.

  “I read you.” From Jamison, back at the Det.

  “You didn’t put your tan on this morning,” came Grind from below. Carter hesitated, but leaned over the bucket and glanced down. Grind wasn’t talking to him, but faced Mather. “You look like the bride of Frankenstein. A lineman’s got burnt arms and neck.” He pointed skyward. “That glowing orb up there? We call it the sun.”

  “Sorry. I forgot,” the kid offered. “What should I do?”

  “Look the part. Slip on a pair of those arm protection sleeves to cover your whiteness. There’s some sunglasses and a pack of cigarettes on the dashboard. Light one up.”

  “But…I don’t smoke.”

  “You do now. And look bored. Type on your phone and shit. I’ll yell at you every once in a while. But now we gotta get these outriggers down so Carter don’t kill himself.”

  Which was quite possible, Carter thought. Borrowing the boom truck from the CIA had been all too easy. They’d picked it up only yesterday from in front of what looked to be a legitimate mom-and-pop lighting contractor’s store. No display of credentials, no checkout log, just a slight nod from a man standing behind the front window. Keys were already in the ignition. Thank goodness Mather knew how to work a clutch or they’d still be there grinding the transmission.

  Carter considered the five levers next to his hip. No labels. He squinted at tiny blue-and-red pictures on the handles. He bumped one, and the boom rotated rapidly, slamming the bucket into the side of a toolbox. He did the same to the lever next to it. With a jerk the thick metal arm rose a few feet higher.

  Grind and Mather leaned on other controls. Long steel beams grew out and downward from the sides of the yellow steel beast till their pads pressed upon the earth and lifted the truck from its wheels. Now stabilized, Carter worked his levers to raise his perch farther skyward. He let go and it jerked to a halt. A mild wave of nausea roiled in his belly. He studied the horizon to shove away the memory of falling off his Cape Cod’s cedar-shingled roof. And tripping down the wooden stairs of a towering waterslide at his son’s twelfth birthday party. And snapping a tree branch where he’d leaned on a ladder while tying his daughter’s rope swing. Nothing good ever happened this high up.

  Grind’s gruff voice hummed through his earpiece. “Boss, the levers ain’t just off or on. Ease ’em and she’ll move slow. Don’t screw yourself up.”

  That was about as close to a concerned tone as Carter had ever heard from the man. To avoid peering down, he stuck a thumbs-up over the side of the bucket. But even when Carter didn’t work the controls, warm breezes rocked the perch. As he eased higher, bagpipes droned like great bees from across the yellow soccer field. A man in black sweats marched in front of a goal, working the pipes and bag, as if sucking on a huge hookah. As Carter inched toward the head of the light pole, the twang of country music came from the truck cabin. He willed a glance down—damn, he was high—and Mather climbed out of the driver’s seat, coughing violently, blowing smoke from both nostrils.

  The aluminum light was huge. They looked nowhere near this big from the ground. Carter fumbled at his tool belt and selected a number three Phillips screwdriver. Within a minute he had the top cover off. Affixed to it was a light sensor that, he’d been told, turned the device on at night. “Jamison, there isn’t much to this,” he said. “Just three wires running from the sensor. They’re screwed into a terminal block.”

  “Like I said. Sweet as pie.”

  “Mather, this won’t take long. Get ready to turn the main power back on so we can test my work.” The man jogged toward the parking lot, flipping a cigarette away onto the gravel path. Carter touched a voltmeter to the terminal block. It stayed at zero: no voltage. He spun off the sensor and replaced it with the new one, which sat somewhat taller, bearing a close resemblance to the old. But beneath its tinted domed
covering, the replacement housed a miniature high-definition camera. The new device worked double duty, also turning the light on at night. Carter tightened down its wire leads. “Mather, hit it.”

  A low buzz hummed from the light head. Voltmeter read an even 240 now. Carter gently rested the cover back atop. “Jamison, you have eyes?”

  The high-pitched spin of a tiny electric motor buzzed from the device. Carter stuck his ear close to it, trying to listen above the audio salad of wind, honking bagpipes, and modern country.

  “All I see is a… OK, that’s your ear.… Yeah, I can see everything. Nice definition. One down. How many you putting up?”

  Carter straightened and sucked a deep breath, stiffening his stomach against motion sickness. With all the rocking, bile kept creeping up his esophagus like on his last deep-sea fishing trip. They’d been caught in a summer storm for six hours.

  He eased the bucket down, jumped out, and leaned on the tailgate.

  Grind laughed. “You look green as Mather sucking on that Marlboro. Scared of heights?”

  Carter glanced at him, then nodded. “Vertigo. They make me dizzy.”

  “They make you ugly. Look like a corpse.” He tapped his temple. “It’s all up here.”

  No shit, Grind. Carter spat onto dry earth. Normally he’d have had a real lineman install the high surveillance. But he’d been careful thus far to limit awareness of this investigation to a select few. That meant doing things himself even when he’d rather not. Anything with heights fell into that category.