He waited to see if the woman caught his reference to the kids’ television show, but nothing flickered in her eyes. She simply replied, “Do you have an appointment?”
Mixell sighed inwardly, then replied, “One p.m.”
“I’ll let him know you’re here.” She smiled and gestured toward an alcove. “Please make yourself comfortable.”
The waiting area was sparsely furnished, containing only a few plush chairs and sofas, plus a watercooler and paper cups. There weren’t any magazines to peruse — it seemed most of the agency’s clientele kept themselves occupied by scrolling through their cell phones. Mixell had only a burner phone, which he didn’t intend to use except in an emergency or at the designated time.
As he looked around, he caught the reflection of a man in a wall-mounted mirror display. He smiled at the handsome stranger, which was himself, of course. Before venturing into Washington, D.C., he had dyed his hair blond and inserted blue contacts, plus implants on both sides of his mouth that modified the structure of his jaw and cheekbones.
Fred Rogers eventually arrived, a tall man in his forties wearing dress slacks and a pressed blue silk shirt.
“Welcome to Capitol Talent Agency.” He shook hands as Mixell stood, then escorted him to a glass-encased office with a desk and small conference table. Both men took their seats at the table, and after a few rounds of small talk, Rogers got down to business.
“I understand you’re looking for a male model. What physical characteristics do you have in mind, and for what type of endeavor?”
“The primary characteristic is… he needs to look like me. The same build and height would be great but neither are essential, as long as they’re reasonably close.”
“What type of work will the model be engaged in?”
“Nothing difficult — he’ll need to be stationed at a designated place and time for an hour.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“I’m having an important business event, and I need a stand-in for a while. But he won’t need to engage with anyone. He’ll just need to hang around and pretend to be me.”
“All right, then,” Rogers replied. “Let me snap an image and get going.”
He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and took a picture of Mixell, which he transferred to a software application. Then he pulled a keyboard on the table closer to him and energized a flat-panel display on the wall. After waiting a moment for the software algorithms to search the Capitol Talent Agency database, ten headshot portraits appeared on the display, with each man’s characteristics — age, height, and weight — listed beneath his picture.
All ten were reasonably close matches, but three stood out from the rest. From a distance, any of the three would do, but a man named Robert Keeshan was the closest match, Mixell decided.
Rogers concurred.
After discussing the agency fee, which Mixell agreed to, Rogers asked, “When do you need him?”
Mixell provided the date and time. “As far as the location goes, it’s not yet set. I’ll call him the day before and let him know. But it’ll be in the D.C. area.”
“Fair enough,” Rogers replied. “Let me confirm that Robert is available and interested,” he said. “Then I’ll draw up the contract and call you when it’s signed and payment has been made. You and Robert can then work out the details of your event.”
Rogers handed Mixell his business card. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you.”
40
NSA BAHRAIN
After boarding the Black Hawk helicopter at Natanz, it had been a quiet trip back to Bahrain for Harrison and the other team members. Upon landing, Leviathan’s wound had been tended to and confirmed not to be life-threatening. The mission debrief took several hours, after which the team was released for the rest of the day, with Harrison and Khalila scheduled to begin their return trip to Langley the next morning.
It was 1 p.m. by the time Harrison opened the door to his room, an upgrade from standard barracks but not by much — about half the size of a standard hotel room — but at least it had an adjoining bathroom with a shower, plus a window offering a view of the warships tied up along the waterfront. It had been a long night in Natanz and he hadn’t gotten much rest during the return trip; he had kept an eye on Leviathan in case his wound was more serious than it appeared. After being awake for more than twenty-four hours, he crashed on the bed for a few hours.
He slept fitfully, his dreams filled with images of Angie, Maddy, and Christine, until he woke late in the afternoon. As he lay in bed, he tried to make sense of the fragmented images. Angie, Maddy, and Christine were the three persons he had loved most in his life, but instead of love and warmth, pain and anguish had permeated his dream.
In Angie’s case, it had been another twisted nightmare where he had tried another strategy to save her from Mixell’s insanity, convinced that this time it would work. Instead, Angie ended up dying in his arms again; he would never forget those last moments as she looked up at him, the light fading from her eyes until they froze in place. His dreams of Maddy were frequently the same, starting with his daughter sitting on Mixell’s lap at the dining room table, Mixell’s knife hovering near her neck. The outcome each time was far worse than what had actually happened, with Maddy ending up on the floor beside her mother, her neck slit, or lying on the barn floor, her head cracked open by Mixell’s shovel.
In his dreams, Christine never died. Instead, she took pleasure in inflicting pain. In this afternoon’s dream, he was back in his house again with Angie lying beside him while Christine tried to extract the gun from Mixell’s hand. She was successful, as she had been that night, but this time, instead of attacking Mixell, she had aimed the pistol at Harrison and fired.
In each nightmare, the scenario involving Christine was either a perversion of what had happened that night or a snippet from their past that had previously held a promise of happiness, only to be replaced with pain and anguish. For some reason, her rejections of his marriage proposals were frequently replayed in his dreams.
As kids, they had been almost inseparable, primarily because both had first-generation Russian mothers who frequently got together, leaving Christine to play with Jake and his two older brothers. Jake always got saddled with the girl, whether they were playing board games or running around outside. As they grew older, Christine chose to hang out with the boys in the neighborhood, even deciding to go by Chris instead of Christine. Her mom’s exasperated efforts to transform her from a tomboy into a proper girl had repeatedly failed. However, nature had eventually taken care of things, and as she matured into a woman, the boys who used to consider her just one of the gang began to look at her differently. By the time they were freshmen in high school, Jake and Christine had started dating.
He had proposed to her twice, and she had rejected both proposals. The first time, they had both just graduated from high school and Christine had been on her way to college on a gymnastics scholarship. She hadn’t been ready to be a wife yet, and certainly not a mother. He waited another four years until she graduated from college and proposed again, but by then Christine had landed a job in Washington, D.C., on Congressman Tim Johnson’s staff, beginning her meteoric rise through the ranks until she ended up with a corner office in the White House barely twenty years later. She’d be ready to get married soon, she kept saying.
Christine was an intelligent and beautiful woman who was intent on climbing the professional and social ladders in Washington, D.C., and it eventually became obvious that she didn’t want to be encumbered by a Midwestern farm boy. After waiting ten years, he realized that he would never be good enough for her and moved on, proposing to Angie a year later. Christine had called the following month, saying she was finally ready. She hadn’t heard the news. He loved Angie, but he sometimes wondered how different things would have been if he had waited just a little longer.