by Alex Howell
“I need to find something belonging to someone,” Mason said, as coyly as possible so he could tell the truth without revealing too much to his friend.
Luke leaned back, sighed, bit his lip, and nodded.
“That’s what I figured,” Luke said, holding up his hand to signal for a moment as he reached underneath his desk.
“What are you looking for?” Mason said, his hand very slowly moving to his holster.
A few seconds later, Luke pulled out a box of stuff that had the name “H. Abdi” written with a sticky note on it. Mason was left to stare in shock that Luke had already procured this, as if he had known he’d need it.
“There’s only so many somethings belonging to someone that we have here, so I figured this would probably be it.”
“Wait… seriously?” Mason said. “How?”
The question was not one of disbelief, but of suspicion.
“Let’s just say when you pull some strings, you need to acquiesce to some favors as well. And one of the requests was that as long as Abdi was in the country, we hold on to these things and investigate them until further notice.”
“And who did you pull strings with?”
Luke gave a heavy sigh.
“Mace, of all people, you are someone I want to help and be as honest and transparent with as I can,” Luke said. “But you know that like many things here, things are on a need to know basis. And right now… if word got out what I did and what I pulled, it would get me in trouble. I’m not trying to stonewall you, although I know I am. I just… you have your secrets, and I have mine.”
Mason wanted more information, but Luke wouldn’t have kept something malicious from him. It just seemed far too unlikely, far too improbable for that to be the case. Mason would sooner believe the President was the traitor than Luke.
“OK.”
Mason stood up, peering at the box. As far as he could see, there were just some papers in a binder, a wrist watch, a small backpack, and a flip phone. He looked at the papers and saw official documentation, most of it in Arabic, from Saudi Arabia. Some of it looked like de facto credentials, but none of it seemed like anything that Mr. Abdi would have needed for whatever he was here for.
“You took his papers?” Mason asked.
“More like some propaganda stuff,” Luke replied. “But I think you’ll find the most interesting thing when you dig a little deeper into what you see.”
“The backpack?” Mason said.
“Nah, I checked through that. Clothes and some snacks. And believe me, we put it through the ringer, looking for anything we could question him on. But his backpack is as innocent as a fourth grader’s.”
“So…”
It’s obvious, isn’t it.
Mason, curious, grabbed Mr. Abdi’s cell phone and flipped it open. Of all the things, that was the most bizarre, to see something from technology that had last existed over two decades before.
And sure enough, once the screen flipped open, he saw a small, very small note inside the “1” digit, just barely noticeable unless someone had been looking closely at the phone. Mason grabbed it, held it close to his eyes, and strained to read.
“Press and hold 1 to activate,” he said, reading the instructions out loud.
He looked at Luke cautiously, almost as if he was forced to believe his old war buddy could have sprung a trap on him.
“We haven’t pressed it yet,” Luke said. “We’re running some tests on it; best we can tell, it’s loaded with some sort of program, but our team is still working at removing the encryption. Keep in mind, this has all happened within the last couple of hours.”
“Good,” Mason said. Now came the moment of truth. “I need to take this.”
“I thought you might say that,” Luke said. “I need you to promise me something, though.”
“Anything.”
Mason didn’t literally mean anything, but for someone like Luke Simon, no one else came as close to the literal definition of “anything” as he did.
“We learned in customs that Abdi plans to return to Saudi Arabia in about 24 hours. His trip seems unusually… short, let’s say. He’s not of the crown, so it’s not like he’s got free private jets wherever he goes.”
So it has to be connected. Him being from there cannot be a coincidence.
“I need that cell phone back by the time he returns. Whatever you need to do with it, just make sure it comes back in one piece. Or, if not, make sure you have something that resembles it in one piece. Unfortunately, given we know there’s something on there, not sure how you’re going to find a replica.”
Mason held the phone, shook it a couple of times, and nodded toward Luke.
“What will you say to your superiors?”
“Took it in for some black-level testing,” Luke said. “The right code phrases will keep the forensics team away long enough. I can’t do it forever, though.”
“So you’d need it back at some point.”
“Yep,” Luke said. “If you don’t get it back to me…”
He’s not going to sell me out. But he’s also not going to let his own career get torpedoed for the sake of me getting out of this in one piece.
“Anything for you, brother,” Mason said. “I’ll make sure you don’t fall under suspicious eyes.”
“I’m serious, though, Mason,” Luke said. “I’m already drawing a lot of eyes for what I did with Abdi. It’s gonna get real ugly for me if I don’t return all of his things. And my boss isn’t gonna cover me for it. He doesn’t even know what I did.”
Wow. He really did pull a lot of strings for me.
Better not disappoint him, then.
“Understood,” Mason said. “You have my word that I will.”
It was about all Mason had left at this point.
After all, his sanity and his sense of certainty had long vanished under the pressures of the last several hours.
20
Mason extended his hand and firmly shook Luke’s.
“I’ll need to show you out,” Luke said. “It’s going to look strange if you just waltz out of here without any protection.”
“I came in here without any.”
“We were watching you as you came in and didn’t let human eyes fall off of you for long,” Luke said. “And, in any case, it’ll look more normal.”
“You don’t worry about you being with me making it look suspicious?”
Luke waved his hand dismissively.
“You’re an old war buddy. We have a lot longer leash having been on the SEALs together than most CIA folks.”
“Good enough,” Mason said, hoping that Luke agreed with him. It wasn’t his head on the line if things went badly.
Luke put a hand on Mason’s back as he led him out, and the two engaged in casual banter over how much they missed the SEALs. It seemed like a conversation topic safe enough that it wouldn’t draw suspicion, but just heavy and loaded enough that people listening in would want to keep some measure of distance from them.
At the front, Luke led him all the way to the front door—noticeably between him and the secretary at the front—before giving him a handshake that soon turned into a hug. Mason patted Luke’s arm, Luke wished Mason well with his new career endeavors, and Mason casually but quickly made his exit, the cell phone in his front pocket.
He didn’t have to wait long to figure out how he’d get to D.C.
In what could only be a nod to Tessa’s instinctive skills honed during her time in the SEALs, one of Mason’s only allies on his current mission pulled up right as he exited out of the CIA building.
Hawkeye’s got the vision of a hawk, it seems.
Mason walked forward casually, opened the car door, and sat down as if getting in a cab. He suddenly turned when he felt Tessa yank on his shirt, pull him in, and kiss him.
“Gotta keep up appearances, right?” she said with a bright smile. “Come on. We’ve got a bit of a hike to D.C. They won’t be able to track us the whole way.�
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Well, that’s a lot to handle. But what’s important?
Less tracking. Good.
“Oh, seriously? Thank God,” Mason said, breathing a massive sigh of relief. “Never know with all this technology and stuff.”
“They’ll see you if we stop anywhere public, but, last I checked, they don’t have cameras in the woods. That is, if you need to do anything.”
“Lovely.”
Tessa put the car in drive and headed down the road, carefully going the speed limit, the better to keep suspicious technology off of her. She waited until they had exited off of the island before she looked back at Mason.
“Whatcha got? What did you get in the CIA?”
Mason reached into his pocket, felt some relief that the cell phone was in fact still there, and pulled it out, showing Tessa.
“Did you go to the Museum of Science & Technology instead?”
“Funny,” Mason said. “I’m supposed to place it in the IRS and let it go from there.”
“Interesting,” Tessa said. “Maybe it can wipe out my taxes.”
“That would be nice,” Mason grumbled, more relieved at the chance to crack jokes than actually finding it funny.
“But why the IRS, I wonder,” Tessa said. “Obviously, they’re trying to strike at the financial system of the USA somehow.”
“Wonder if it’s somehow connected to the Saudi trillion dollars or so getting stolen,” Mason said, but he was feeling quite tired. He hadn’t thought a few minutes before that he would ever get the chance to pass out—nor have the peace of mind to do so—but the events of the day had gotten to him too much. “Hey, before we get into that, how long do we have?”
Tessa checked her phone.
“Just a hair under four hours,” she said.
“And we won’t be monitored the further out we go, right?”
“That’s the idea, yeah.”
It was exactly what Mason needed to hear.
“I need sleep, bad. You good to drive?”
Tessa, thank God, didn’t seem fazed in the slightest by the request. Instead, she just turned to him, smiled, and turned back.
“See you at sunset,” Mason said, soon falling asleep much faster than even he could have anticipated.
Mason awoke to a darkened sky, sending him into a slight panic as to how late he might have slept. How long had he slept? Had Tessa taken him somewhere past D.C.? Had he missed his one chance?
“Rise and shine, soldier,” Tessa said in the driver’s seat. “It’s a little after seventeen hundred hours. We’ll be in D.C. in about an hour and a half.”
OK, we’re good. She’s still on my side. Always has been.
“Cool,” he said, grumbling.
Pretty rare, you know. Pretty rare to have someone that loyal to you.
Don’t do anything to screw it up.
“By the way… thanks.”
Tessa looked over at him and, unlike all of her previous encounters from before, gave him a genuine, strictly platonic smile.
“I’m sorry I have to put you through everything with that flirting and stuff,” she said. “I know how you feel about… you know, your, uhh, wife…”
“You can say her name. Bree,” Mason said with a prolonged sigh. “I appreciate you being polite, but I know what you’re probably thinking of me and what others have thought of me. It’s true. I should move past her, but I don’t want to. Frankly, it’s kind of easy to just settle into the life.”
“And is that what you want?”
A dreaded silence hanged over the air as Tessa’s words struck Mason far stronger than she had probably expected and he had hoped. What Mason had said was absolutely true—half the reason he still wore his wedding ring and liked to call Bree his wife, not his deceased wife or ex-wife, was because it was just easier that way. It took a lot of effort to go out, to make dates, to meet women, and to find someone worth having.
It was passively easy to just focus on work and raising Clara. It was simplistically easy to make those his only missions, especially in light of Bree’s final words to Mason.
But she would be graduating soon. The last remaining spirit of Bree would be going to college soon, and even if she went to a nearby Maryland college, Mason wouldn’t see her more than once a week at the most. She was most likely, rather, going to go somewhere out of state, at which point Mason wouldn’t see her for more than a month.
And, at that point, the death of Bree, which had happened so many years ago, would finally seem finished. The only way it could seem more final was an outcome for Clara that Mason refused to contemplate.
But no matter what, “it was easy” would not apply to Mason’s life for much longer. And then what?
“It doesn’t matter what I want,” Mason said, trying to deflect the question.
Tessa looked at him, looked at him again, and appeared to turn her attention back to the road for a bit.
“Then what are you even here for?” she asked. “Why do you risk life and limb for your daughter?”
“Because I love her.”
“And you want what’s best for her, right?”
“Of course.”
“So don’t you think what’s best for her is a happy, satisfied father?”
Realizing the truth in Tessa’s words, Mason just looked out the window at the stars above. He didn’t get into these moments often when it felt like someone had him beat logically or emotionally, and he didn’t like them at all. It made him realize that the way he was handling things wasn’t nearly as optimal as they could be. If Bree was up there…
She’d probably kick my butt for being so mopey. She’d tell me to move on and find someone else, or at the very least to start doing so once Clara left.
But I don’t think there’s anyone else I could ever love like her.
No one else… I think.
“Happiness is something that left me the day Bree died,” Mason said. “Clara is all that I have left. Everything that I do is based around making her happy. If she’s happy, I’m happy. I don’t have anything else left to live for.”
“Mason!” Tessa said.
Mason thought of turning the tables and asking about her love life and her purposes in life, but that just seemed unnecessarily harsh for a mission on which he depended upon her skills. As much as he wanted to delay asking himself why he had become so emotionally frail on this mission, asking Tessa those questions required an even harsher push back.
“It’s the truth,” he continued.
“But is it the complete truth?”
He sighed.
“Can we have this conversation when my daughter isn’t being held hostage by some assholes that I need to kill?”
Tessa bit her lip, nodded, and turned her attention back to the road ahead.
“Did you see what happened to Saudi Arabia?” he said. “I know I mentioned it earlier, but now that I’m awake, we might as well talk about it more.”
“Saudi Arabia?” Tessa said, her tone of voice answering the question for Mason.
“Yeah, like I said, apparently trillions of dollars were stolen from the state.”
“And by state, you probably mean the crown,” she said, concern in her voice rising. “Think this had anything to do with Harnad Abdi? And the device that you have?”
Mason gave a short chuckle.
“You know I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“Neither do I,” Tessa said after a short pause. “What do you think is going on?”
Mason went into the tank for a few seconds, pondering the question and running through all of the variables at play before eventually narrowing in.
“My best guess? Some terrorist group has Mr. Abdi either under their control or under their employment. They already stole money from Saudi Arabia and now they’re going to steal money from the USA. There’s probably someone in the government in cahoots with them who knew who I was, captured my daughter, and is using me to get this done. Does that sound logical?”
Mason shrugged.
“Not sure,” he said. “Frankly, I’m not worried about what three extremists will do at a warehouse in comparison to what the two countries would do with all this money stolen.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” Tessa said, nerves evident in her voice. “I’ll tap into my contacts and see if we can find out anything else.”
“Got it,” Mason said before his mind jumped to another topic.
“What about the phone?”
“The thing that Mr. Abdi had that I got from the CIA?” Mason said. “Guy I got it from said they think there’s some sort of computer virus on it. Maybe it’ll help them steal money from the IRS.”
“And you want to go through with this still?”
It was a question that for most people might have prompted some serious thoughts, some genuine deliberation, and perhaps even a change of plans. The only thing it did for Mason, though, was affirm his commitment to the cause.
“I need to protect my daughter first and foremost,” Mason said. “Once I have her safety, I’ll find Luke and General Jones and get their help. Sorry, we might lose billions of dollars, but I’d rather lose all of that than lose my daughter.”
Tessa gave a sweet smile at that—almost too sweet. Mason, feeling a bit uncomfortable by the look, quickly changed the topic.
“Did your location service ever figure out the location of the call?”
Tessa shook her head.
“Working on it, but it’s slow. This is top-notch stuff, Mason. Whoever is doing this is using stuff I’ve never seen before. Not that I can’t break it, just that breaking it is going to take some time first.”
“Definitely someone inside the US government, then,” Mason surmised. “Someone with high-level access to some really good technology.”
“You sound so sure.”
“What else would it be?”
Tessa just shook her head.
“Never count anything out in cases like these, Mason,” she said. “I’ve handled a lot of dangerous, high-stakes cases like this. You can’t ever rule anything out until you’ve caught the person responsible—and even then, it’s not always clear.”