by J C Ryan
“I suggest you stop wasting my time, stop smoking that shit, or change whatever medication you’re on that bedevils your brain, and start looking for real answers in the right places.”
Carson backed down.
He and Brandt finished their dinner in silence, but both, for different reasons, were remembering the stories Brandt had told Carson about the Ghost about four years ago.
Brandt was remembering how Rex had flown a battered helicopter into their headquarters from a Mexican border town, mission accomplished, and every team member accounted for, though two were dead because of a traitor who compromised the mission and almost got all of them killed.
Carson remembered the story of how the Ghost had solved the gun issue in the UK during a deep undercover mission to kill an arms dealer. Brandt had told him of the irony of the Russian target being killed by an antique Russian semi-automatic pistol, stolen from another Russian whom the Ghost had taken down by stealing kiddie-porn pictures in the bastard’s possession at the same time he took the weapon. Two assholes for the price of one, Brandt had called it. Carson didn’t say it, but that was the type of mission that would never have been greenlighted if he was DCIA at the time.
While Brandt’s mind went quickly from reminiscence to the current state of affairs, outwardly he reassured Carson that no one, not even his Ghost, could possibly have done everything Carson described on his own. But in fact, his mind was working overtime to figure out how Rex had done it. If there were one man who could do it on his own, he knew of only one who had the ability. It couldn’t have been anyone else.
Rex Dalton was alive!
Brandt clung to the hope even as he recognized it could have been someone else’s team – not one man but three or more. Maybe Carson was even lying that it wasn’t the CIA.
Brandt was determined to investigate the incident on his own to corroborate the one-man theory. In his heart, though, he couldn’t help but think this was as good as getting a personal call from Rex saying, “I’m alive and well, and I’m on my way home, but don’t stay up for me. I'll come in late.”
It was the last thought that sent a cold shiver down his spine as he remembered the conversation with Longland a month or so before Dalton was posted on the Afghanistan mission a year ago. “If it ever becomes necessary to eliminate him, make sure it’s done properly, because if you screw that up and he survives… we’re dead… all of us. He will hunt us down and kill us all first. And then he will go after the politicians, officials, and other scoundrels — the domestic enemies. There won’t be any stopping him.”
He hadn’t told Carson that it was Rex ‘the Ghost’ Dalton in Kabul. Carson’s probing for that information was a non-starter. Brandt suppressed his need to form contingency plans for the moment and circled back to the original question after they ordered dessert.
“Carson, there’s no chance this was my man. He couldn’t have survived the explosion. If he had, he’d have been in touch. Even if by some chance he did survive, neither he nor anyone else, not even the Ghost, could have done this latest thing alone. You’re mistaken – it wasn’t a one-man job. And on the ridiculous assumption that both of those things were true, it still couldn’t have been my guy, anyway. It’s against our operating procedures to be acting on an operation this big without proper instructions.” In every part of that assurance, Brandt was lying. If Rex were alive, he would absolutely be doing exactly what Carson had described. It was that, most of all, that gave Brandt his brightest hope.
Carson desperately wanted to be convinced, so he accepted Brandt’s word for it.
He was startled, therefore, when Brandt went on the offensive. Brandt had been given plenty of time to think about what happened to Rex’s team two days before. He’d put two and two together and had questions only the DCIA could answer, if only he would.
Their dessert had arrived, and Brandt had noted Carson’s dramatic change of demeanor after his last assurance. It confirmed what he’d been thinking. Carson was somehow involved in that ambush, and Brandt made a decision he’d get to the bottom of it. If Carson was involved, he’d arrange for him to have a horrible accident.
He began with a seemingly innocuous statement.
“You know, it’s obvious that explosion that killed my man and his team was an ambush.”
Carson was caught off-guard with a mouthful of Crème Brûlée. He swallowed convulsively and stared at Brandt.
“What are you saying?”
“What do you think I’m saying? The CIA’s information – or should I say your information? – was wrong. Terribly wrong. So wrong it cost the lives of eight people, good men. Soldiers…”
Carson stood so rapidly he almost upset the table. Glasses rocked from the collision. “You’re accusing me?”
“If the shoe fits, Carson. How the hell could your intel be so wrong? Who screwed up? More to the point, who was the traitor? Who gave it away?”
“Gave what away?” Carson hissed.
“How did the bad guys know the team was coming, Carson? Gave that away. Answer that. That’s the issue I’m dealing with here, and now it’s in your court. Until the CIA sorts out what happened, we, CRC, won’t take another contract from you. I also find it interesting that you’ve not thought of this yourself and that you’d take my questions as a personal attack on you.”
Carson scrambled for the high ground, missing it by yards. “I do take it personally when you call my agency’s competency into question, much less our patriotism.”
“Oh, hogwash, Carson. If your agency were competent, there’d be no need for my outfit and others like mine. Sit down. You’re making a fool of yourself.”
Carson sat heavily but continued to bluster. “Fine. We don’t need you. You won’t get another contract from us. There are plenty of other contractors. What happens to your precious outfit then?”
Brandt smiled. “I’ll tell you what happens. I’m a wealthy man. I’ll shut down CRC in the blink of an eye, disband my teams, and retire to a golf community somewhere with a perfect climate. But my men – well, they might not be inclined to retire. They might just decide to offer their services to the highest bidder anywhere in the world. Especially after I tell them the CIA can’t be trusted, and you better believe me - I’ll make sure they know that.”
Carson’s face went white. “How many agents do you have?”
Brandt grinned. He had Carson worried. “Enough to cause so much shit across the globe and the US you would miss the good old days of Islamic fanatics,” he replied.
Carson was indeed worried. He knew it was more than just CRC. Brandt’s outfit was off the books, as were a few others. They didn’t exist on paper. No written contracts, no audit trail. He had no way of knowing how many agents there were, and had no way of finding out, but he suspected Brandt knew some of the other private contractor organizations. If he spread his suspicions and private operators started going rogue, he had a shipload of trouble on his hands.
If the other private contractors got word of this snafu and believed the CIA’s incompetence was to blame, they’d refuse to work with him, and that incompetence would be manifest in the resulting world chaos. If they knew it was his treachery, he was a dead man. Even if they didn’t discover his role in it, and even if the other contractors didn’t refuse to work with him, word could leak out that the CIA was incompetently led. The whole situation could ruin his career prospects.
He changed his stripes so fast it made Brandt’s head spin.
“You’re right, John. I overreacted, and I’m sorry. I’ll put my best counterintelligence team on it as soon as I get back to my office. You deserve to know what happened to your man.”
Brandt didn’t buy it for a minute. It was too easy. He also knew he bore a certain amount of the blame, for trusting the DCIA. But if he couldn’t trust the head of his country’s foreign intelligence agency, who could he trust?
Nonetheless, he knew he could trust this: Rex was coming for him and everyone else. Not now, not s
oon, but one day, he would turn up out of the shadows, like a ghost, and it would then be exactly as Longland said, “we’re dead… all of us.”
Maybe he would have time to make his excuses, not that Rex would or should listen to them. Maybe he wouldn’t. He could only hope he would have the opportunity to tell Rex what happened on this side and what he, John Brandt, had done about it.
He left Carson with a very chilling thought. Fortunately, they were alone in the restaurant, and there were no recordings.
“Carson you need to get to the bottom of this and very quickly …” Brandt stopped there and didn’t complete the sentence.
Carson took umbrage again, his fears whipsawing his mood. “You threatening me?”
Brandt said, “Nope, not at all. Think of it as something like the weather prediction. A foreshadowing of things likely to come.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Just that, Carson. You need to get to the bottom of this and very quickly. It’s your duty to get to the bottom of it. If you don’t, you are not doing your duty. And usually, when people don’t perform their duties as expected, then someone gets rid of them.”
Carson got up and left the table without another word. In his white-hot rage, he might say too much, but he vowed Brandt would get his comeuppance sooner or later.
After all, I’m going to be President someday.
28
Quetta, Pakistan, June 25, 9:00 a.m.
REX SAT IN his SUV, feeding Digger a take-away breakfast of scrambled eggs and qeema, a minced-meat concoction with peas. He’d worried at first that Digger wouldn’t like the curried meat or the peas, but apparently hunger was more important to his companion than taste. He had ordered Digger’s curry only mildly spicy. Rex was a bit worried what effect the unusual diet the dog had enjoyed since his last normal meal would have on his digestive system. He only hoped that if Digger needed a veterinarian, it would wait another twenty-four hours.
They had left their hotel in Chaman at 6:00 a.m., waiting for breakfast until they’d reached the larger town of Quetta. The capital city of the Balochistan Province, with more than one million people, was known as the ‘Fruit Garden of Pakistan’ because of the many fruit orchards in and around the city.
Here, Rex hoped to exchange some of his dollars for Pakistani rupees without causing a stir. That would make it easier to buy gasoline at small villages on his marathon trip across the country to Lahore, where he’d once again have to sneak across the border.
Historically, Pakistan and India had been hostile neighbors for decades since the partition after independence from British rule. Religious differences in the majority of citizens from each country were partially to blame. In recent years, attempts to improve the relationship had been only mildly successful. The tension between the two nuclear powers flared up at times, and on a few such occasions the military on both sides had been mobilized and moved to the border. Fortunately, Providence had thus far protected them from itchy-trigger-finger syndrome, thus preventing either of them from pushing the nuclear missiles’ launch buttons.
Rex himself had been instrumental in one thaw in relations, after finding and punishing the Pakistanis responsible for a reprehensible attack on Indian civilians at a hotel in Mumbai in 2008.
The borders were still tightly controlled, however. Any attempt to cross them without identity papers would land him in a Pakistani jail. The drive itself would take more than seventeen hours – there was no time to find a forger and obtain passable papers. Taking a southern route to the only other viable border crossing, that is, where roads would get him there, would take only fourteen hours. But the busy city of Lahore would provide more anonymity. The extra three hours was a necessary sacrifice.
Ironically, if Rex hadn’t thought to throw off pursuit by heading southwest from Kabul instead of east, he’d have been in India already by now. Or dead from an IED on the Kabul-Jalalabad highway, or captured by Afghan or even US authorities. It had been the right decision, even though it was costing him an extra day.
Digger had finished his breakfast. When Rex’s watch showed precisely 9:00 a.m., he told the dog to stay, got out of the SUV, and approached the doors of the bank he’d been parked in front of. At the same moment, a bank employee opened the door and smiled in Rex’s direction.
Ten minutes later, Rex had exchanged a one-hundred-dollar bill from one of Usama’s bundles for a little less than twelve-thousand Pakistani rupees. That would be enough to top off his gas tank just before he reached Lahore, ensuring he’d make it to New Delhi, India before he had to fill it again. After that, he’d have no need of Pakistani currency, or even Indian. In India, he knew, dollars were as good as gold and no explanations would be required as to what a poor Middle Eastern man was doing with hundred-dollar bills.
When Rex got back into the SUV, he turned to Digger. “Ready for a road trip, boy?” For some reason, today’s drive felt more like an adventure to him than yesterday’s fleeing for his life had. His mood was considerably improved by the solid eight hours of sleep he’d had the previous night and the reset of his body-clock’s nights and days back to normal.
Over the past few days, Rex had time to think and take stock of his life, and he had to admit that his life hadn’t been normal for over ten years. But then, what would normal look like for a man who had to be dead to stay alive? A thirty-two-year-old male with no family, no girlfriend, no friends, no country, and no identity, which, if things went to plan, would soon become a life-long fake identity. The bouts of introspection led him to the conclusion that ‘normal’ for him was not going to be the same as ‘normal’ for others, and that he would have to make his own version of normal. Parts of these musings were taken up by the idea of making his way to Europe with a new identity, where it would, he hoped, be much less like the Old Man’s description of an agent’s life, endless travel, long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Of the three he would keep only the first — endless travel. He was excited about the prospect to go places and see things. The last two — boredom and terror — he was going to avoid like the plague.
Up until a few days ago, Rex hadn’t thought he’d ever be ready to retire from CRC. Now, it seemed, he was.
He didn’t fool himself. Retiring from any black ops outfit was not as easy as typing out a letter of resignation, signing it and handing to your boss, accompanied with or without gestures such as a middle finger or the words, “Stick your job into a dark place at the bottom of your anatomy.” You either died during a mission or you negotiated a disappearance, which meant you became someone else. There was no middle ground. Not turning up for work one day would mean they would send teams out to find you and kill you. The only way that wouldn’t happen is if you were already dead. And that was, as far as Rex could figure it out, what they would believe about him right now — Rex Dalton was dead.
Would John Brandt have him killed if he knew Rex was alive and trying to walk away? Rex had no way of knowing, but he didn’t plan on doing anything to test the notion.
Rex had no regrets. He’d long since lost touch with teammates in CRC, a side-effect of his known penchant for working alone plus his long deployment in Afghanistan. His family was dead, his girlfriend set aside, and except for one short impersonal letter, never heard from after he enlisted in the Marines. His only friends had been two of the men killed three days ago in that ambush. Had it only been three days? Rex was suddenly weary. It had felt like three years.
Looking backward was clearly not in his best interest. The past can't be changed. It could only inform the future.
Rex gave a brief thought to the money he had in the US. He’d invested the money he inherited from his parents including the proceeds from the sale of the house when he joined the Marines. It was a sizeable chunk by now, a bit more than $350,000, he hadn’t looked at a statement lately. He’d never needed it before. His lifestyle didn’t require him to own a home or the possessions to fill it. His immediate needs had a
lways been supplied by CRC, including anything he needed for daily expenses like food and accommodation. The money would come in handy now, but he couldn’t get to it.
What would happen to it now that I’m ‘dead’?
The major problem, as far as he could see, was that there was no body to prove his death. If DNA samples were collected at the site of the explosion they would be able to identify eight bodies but his would not be among them. Rex didn’t know much about the legal processes involved, but he supposed that dying in another country, and in circumstances such as his, would complicate matters back in America when it came to wind up his estate. He thought he remembered reading somewhere that unclaimed monies went to the government if there was no will. Maybe the government searched for lost relatives. They’d have a difficult search in his case. Both his parents were only children. He had no clue about his grandparents. Maybe his parents had cousins, but if they did, they had never mentioned them.
He wished he’d left a will with John Brandt. Brandt always insisted everyone who passed his rigorous selection and training regimen had one before their first deployment. Rex was a fool for claiming there was no one he could bequeath his estate to.
Jessie could have used the money.
He’d treated her badly, not because he didn’t love her, but because he’d thought there was no love left in him to give to anyone after that morning in Spain. He’d been stashing her so far away in a corner of his heart, bent on revenge, that he’d hardly ever thought of her for the past few years. When he did, it was with regret for breaking her heart.
Yes, she could have used the money.
There was nothing he could do about it now. He put it firmly out of his mind. He still had to get out of this godforsaken country safely.