“There was an operation two years ago called Nemesis.” Tranthan leaned over his desk back at Langley, speaking in a low voice to the man across from him, Brigadier General Ben Arnault of the United States Marine Corps.
“I don’t recall that one,” said Arnault.
Tranthan expected this. Those who knew of the Nemesis operation could be counted on the fingers of one hand. One of those lived at Number One Observatory Circle.
“A man named Scott was involved,” said Tranthan. “I know him. He used to be pretty good.”
“Yes, sir,” said Arnault patiently.
Tranthan liked his young general. Arnault came to work at 4:00 A.M., seven days a week, and rarely left until well after dark. He was always at his desk, just outside Tranthan’s office, except for two workouts a day, which were runs or swims while the boss was either at lunch or away from Langley. He also felt comfortable being assisted by a military man. Tranthan himself had left the army after twenty years of service. He could have become a flag officer like Ben Arnault. Tranthan was fluent in both Farsi and Russian, he had a master’s in psychology, and he was married to the oldest daughter of the senior senator from Pennsylvania. His ticket had all the necessary punches. But after the wedding he had been offered a mid-level appointment to Langley and left his army career behind. It had been the right decision. Langley represented the chance to play in a different game, at a different level. It had an edge. It had opportunity. It gave a young, ambitious climber the chance to gain a lot of IOUs. And he knew he would be good at it. But still, deep inside, Tranthan was aware that he’d always be that army major. And if he were honest with himself, he got a charge out of having a flag officer at his beck and call.
“Oh, Ben. Before I forget… The security officer in Doha may have had something on his phone.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can we check that out?”
“Done.”
“Good. Now, as I was saying… Nemesis involved the insertion of a freelance agent into North Korea. A missile engineer was working on a project that would have given them an intercontinental ballistic missile that was going to take out our Pacific GPS satellites.”
“Was he a North Korean?” Arnault asked, eyebrows raised.
“No. In fact, he was a Marine.”
“Korean American?”
“No. Anglo as you and me. Someone they brought out of the reserves.”
“Really? Why—”
“Have you ever heard of Cardinal Mezzofanti?” asked Tranthan.
“Yes, sir,” Arnault said. “Learned about him at Monterey.”
Arnault also spoke Russian after being sent to DLIFLC for a year. The Defense Language Institute in Monterey was a special opportunity for any young officer.
“Spoke thirty or more languages, right?”
Tranthan nodded. “Not only spoke them, but spoke them with the exact inflections and dialect of someone who’d spoken them all his life. He’d hear the language once, and that’s it: he’d be perfectly fluent.”
“So this Marine was a—” began Arnault.
“Is, Ben. He’s a Mezzofanti — Korean, Arabic, you name it. I need to get to him immediately.”
“Yes, sir. How, sir?”
“Start with Scott, the guy who ran Nemesis. He can get to the man we need. Get him, and we can get somewhere with this bombing. I want to know who was behind it.” Tranthan looked his aide directly in the eyes. “I want to know who hurt Maggie.”
CHAPTER 4
The pickup truck turned off the paved highway onto the dirt road, plunging into the absolute darkness of the predawn countryside. Although the leaves of fall had started turning to orange and yellow, the trees still managed to blanket out any hint of the quarter moon. A cold front had dropped the temperature down.
“How far now?” Michael Hendley had come straight from the graveyard shift of the credit card — processing company. He should have been exhausted. He leaned back in the seat, put his Red Wing hunting boots up on the dashboard, and pulled his John Deere cap down.
“Get your damn boots off my truck.”
Mike Hendley smiled and dropped his feet. His cousin’s Silverado had cost him a year’s worth of pay in brush guards, running boards, and winches alone. A gentle level of harassment was common between the cousins, and it went both ways.
Not only was Hendley not feeling the expected fatigue, but also he hadn’t been this charged up in months. Unlike his father, Hendley used his past military experience with computers to become “white-collar labor,” as he liked to call it. He made sure that the machines kept churning throughout the night as they received data from credit card users around the world, but he was still caged in a cubicle with walls he could touch with extended fingertips. It paid well and, as with his cousin, it kept him in fairly new trucks, but the clock moved slowly on the graveyard shift. Deer hunting season, however, woke him up. Even the remote promise of a record buck turned the adrenaline on. Sleep was a low priority this time of year.
“Almost there,” said the cousin, referring to the end of the road, not their final destination. After parking the truck, they’d hike at least another three miles.
Mike knew that his cousin wouldn’t have even told him about this hunt except that a hike out of the woods with a two-hundred-pound trophy buck would have been too much for one man.
He also guessed that wherever they were going, they would be trespassing. But it really didn’t matter. A trophy deer with a point score over 170 was a five-figure deer. A hunting show had paid $25,000 just to display a record Boone and Crockett buck last year at its show. In Mike’s world, $25,000 would buy a new four-wheeler, a Winchester with a scope, and a letter from the tax man six months later reminding him of the government’s share.
At the end of the road it was so dark that Hendley only sensed his cousin’s presence by the sound of his movement as he came around the truck.
“We bringing the deer stands?” Mike asked. The hunter, to pull himself up into a tree to gain elevation and a clear line of sight, used the camouflaged aluminum cage with a seat.
“No, this place is sweeter than that. Just wait and see.”
The cousin turned on his small LED light, which only illuminated the trail directly in front of him. Mike followed closely behind except for the occasional limb that slapped him in the face. With their rifles slung over their shoulders, the pair cut deeper into the woods, their breath billowing up in the light as it bobbed up and down on the trail.
The cousin stopped at the top of a hill, fully out of breath, and shined his light on the metal sign that said POSTED — NO TRESPASSING. He turned off the flashlight for a brief moment. They stood still while their eyes readjusted to the dark. What were the chances anyone was nearby? Even in the deep woods of Georgia, it was rare to not see a light well off in the distance or hear a truck grinding through gears on some highway. Here, they both stood in absolute darkness and silence.
The hunters followed the ridgeline as it skirted around a small, deep valley below. Again, they began to climb up, over an outcrop of rock that led to a ledge. After passing through a stand of hundred-year-old pine trees, they had come to a forest of hardwood trees, oak and hickory, which now stood below them. Hendley knew that the oak and hickories would pull in the deer. The shelter of the hardwoods and the constant supply of acorns created the perfect chemistry for a record-setting buck.
“This is sweet.”
“You haven’t seen anything yet.” The cousin lay down on the grassy ledge.