“Never asked,” Wilkes responded with a wry chuckle. “Not sure I want to know.”
“Smart man. It’s what, ten minutes till check-in?”
“Five. They upped the frequency — this Nichols fellow has somebody’s shorts in a bind for some reason.”
“You see the info dump on FOX News at eleven?” Sanchez asked, shooting a look of disbelief over at his partner. “Afghanistan, Iraq — this guy’s been everywhere, and that’s just the stuff they’re willing to talk about.”
“So?”
Sanchez shook his head. Wilkes had always been one to talk tough — usually he could back it up. But tonight? “So…we’re dealing with Jason Bourne and you’d better be taking it seriously, compadre.”
“Listen, I’m sorry, fellas.” It was probably the sixth time those words had come from Steve McNab’s lips in five hours, the words of a man who didn’t know what else to say
“Nothing to be sorry for,” Thomas responded, looking over his shoulder at the retired F-16 pilot who’d been the safehouse’s caretaker. “You followed protocol. Protocol said if the chalk was up, you were to stay away. So you stayed away until you got our call.”
“Sometimes protocol bites you in the butt,” came Tex’s succinct comment. He was kneeling at the door of the open gun safe, a notepad in his hands.
“Give us a few, Steve,” Thomas asked, motioning for the pilot to leave the room. He waited until McNab had disappeared behind the closing door and opened the screen of his laptop. “Harry’s driving a 2004 Ford Excursion, NY plates, license number Alpha Delta niner Romeo two seven. The vehicle is registered under the name Robert L. Stephenson, so that’s likely his alias.”
Tex looked up from his notes. “Any credit cards under that name?”
“Likely — I’m looking into it now.”
“Harry always preferred American Express, if that helps any.”
“Figures,” Thomas said, clicking rapidly through the on-screen database. “Don’t leave home without it. Got it — expiration date 2/18, registered in the name of Robert Lewis Stephenson. Well, he’s not lost his sense of humor.”
“Gonna be able to do anything with it?”
Thomas’s eyes narrowed as he scrolled down to the bottom of the screen. “Think so. The trouble is going to be doing it without Langley’s firepower. There’s a backdoor into the AmEx network — Carol showed me how to get in during the Caracas op two years ago.”
“Caracas?” Tex asked, getting up and coming over to the laptop. “That was right after she came to Langley — how’d she have the clearance to know about a backdoor like that?”
An amused smile crossed Thomas’s face. “The way I understood the story, it’s her backdoor. Nobody asked too many questions. If I can get in, the minute Harry makes a purchase — we’ve got him.”
“That might be awhile.”
Thomas looked up at Tex, his friend’s face shifting in and out of focus. He blinked, fighting against fatigue and the alcohol still coursing through his bloodstream. “Why?”
“He cleared out all his cash.”
“Great,” Thomas whispered, burying his head in his hands. He should have realized…
“How much?”
“Judging by the size of the security box — by the likely denomination — I’d say 10k. Minimum. He’s not going to get within ten klicks of an airport, and that’s about the only place he’d use plastic.”
Time to go to Plan B. The only question: what was that?
“So, what are we doing?”
Brushing her hair back out of her eyes, Carol looked up from the maps she had been studying under the glow of the dome light. “We’re near Orkney Springs. Another ten miles and we’ll be in West Virginia.” She looked out at the darkness surrounding the vehicle and switched the light off. “When were you going to tell me the plan?”
When? He shifted the Excursion into gear and got back on the road.
“I believe I mentioned Samuel Han.”
“You did.”
Harry cleared his throat, focusing briefly on the task at hand. The back roads hadn’t been treated — the state of Virginia, like just about every state in the union, had been running short of money for years. Anymore, it took a blizzard to get any salt spread on the highways before Christmas.
Back roads? Forget about it.
“Sammy was one of the best operators I ever worked with,” he said after a moment. “Rock-solid. He’d married a girl by the name of Sherri from Virginia Beach, had a couple kids — twin boys. They’d gotten married when he was still at Little Creek, so she knew the score. Or thought she did.”
He could feel her eyes on him as he paused. “He was different…well, to be blunt — no one wears their wedding band on an op. A lot of guys use that as an excuse to sleep around when they’re overseas. Not Sammy — theirs was a love story. American dream.”
“Was?” Harry could feel the pain in her question. A survivor’s pain.
“Yeah. There’s always a was. Sherri was used to him going off in the middle of the night — but she never got used to the accelerated op tempo of the Special Activities Division. Sammy was gone more than he was home. A lot of women would have turned around and left right then, but she stuck it out.”
The Excursion’s tires fishtailed slightly in wet, slushy snow and Harry turned his attention back to the road. “We’re coming up to a fork — right or left?”
“Left,” she responded, consulting the map in her hand.
“Sammy was deployed when it happened,” Harry continued, swinging the SUV onto the left fork of the road. “His son Lee was playing ball in the street near their house in Norfolk when he was struck by a car. Turned out to be an old fellow in his mid-eighties, got confused — hit the gas instead of the brakes. We were in the Yemeni desert when I got the call. Had to make the choice of whether to tell him.”
“You didn’t, did you?” she asked when he hesitated.
“A distracted operator is a dead operator,” Harry replied calmly. “We’d been deep black for three weeks — I had two choices: tell Sammy and abort the mission — or see it through.”
“Three,” Carol interjected, an icy chill to her voice.
“What?”
“You had a third option — tell Han and trust him to keep his mind on the mission.”
Harry looked out the SUV’s window, white snow drifting down against the darkness of the Appalachian night. Pine trees heavy with snow flashed past in the glare of the headlights.
“That wasn’t on the table,” he said finally. “People speak of trust as if were some sort of virtue. It’s not — it’s probably the greatest — the most seductive, of all vices. Trust kills.”
Boredom. That was the worst part of the job. Deputy Sanchez hefted the twelve-gauge shotgun in his hand and moved to the front of the patrol car.
He’d joined the Shenandoah County Sheriff’s Department three years before, on a whim. At the time, he’d been laid off from his construction job — and the government was about the only entity hiring. It had to be more exciting than driving a bulldozer.
Cradling the Mossberg under the crook of his arm, he blew steam on his hands and chuckled to himself. Exciting.
Yeah, right. He’d fired his department-issued Glock in the line of duty twice in three years. Didn’t even take it to the range that much anymore.
A vehicle materialized out of the snowy night without warning, the lights of a big Ford Excursion spotlighting the deputy.