Authors: Phillip Finch
“Ronnie …? Ronnie,
no
!”
She began to run toward the highway.
“Ronnie!”
The door banged shut. In a few seconds, the diesel sound picked up, louder, rising and falling, growling up through the gears as it pulled away.
Lorna hurried back to the house. She found her phone and immediately dialed her son. After a few rings, he finally answered.
“Ronnie, come back. Tell the driver to stop, you come back!”
“No, Mommy. I can’t do that.”
“What are you doing?”
“Don’t you know?” he said. “The truth is in Manila. I’m going to find Marivic.”
In an office suite on the top floor of a lodge on the south shore of Lake Tahoe, Nevada, Raymond Favor stood beside the desk where Arielle Bouchard was working. He looked down and picked up a framed snapshot.
Arielle was astonished. The photo had sat there for several years, and Favor had never taken notice. She knew he was aware of the photo. Favor missed nothing. He had just never chosen to acknowledge it.
Now he was studying it, giving it full attention.
The photo had been taken sixteen years earlier, on a very hot July afternoon. It showed Arielle and Favor—then twenty-two and twenty-eight years old—with two other men at an outdoor bar, all four of them grinning at the camera and hoisting their drinks high in a boozy salute.
“That was a great day,” Arielle said.
Favor nodded almost imperceptibly as he peered down at the photo in his hands.
“You think about those times?” Favor said.
“I think about the good parts.”
“I would do that if I could,” Favor said. “But it doesn’t work for me. So I try to just leave it alone.”
“We have plenty to be proud of.”
“That’s getting into dangerous ground,” he said. “If you tally the right and the wrong, I’m not sure we come out looking so good.”
“Done is done, Ray. My advice, let go of the bad parts, hang on to what made you feel good.”
He said, “That’s where I run into trouble. Because the really bad stuff, the shit that keeps you awake at night if you dwell on it … I loved it. I mean, I
loved
it. I was doing what I was born to do. I was a natural.”
Favor gave the photo a last long look and replaced it on the desk. He said, “So you see my problem. The feel-good times, the nightmare scenes—I can’t tell ’em apart. For me they’re one and the same.”
The four in the photo could have been a study group of graduate students relaxing after a successful round of final exams, or longtime friends toasting a wedding engagement. They seemed that familiar together, standing hip against hip, free arms draped over one another’s shoulders. In fact, they had met as a group just the day before and were celebrating their first collective success as clandestine agents in training.
Arielle was second from the left in the photo, standing tall and straight even after three beers. Born and raised in Boston, she was the daughter of a French mathematician and his Senegalese wife. Arielle had dazzling green eyes, a mocha complexion, and a regal profile.
To Arielle’s right was Alex Mendonza, Oahu born, with the typically Hawaiian riot of ancestral blood: Irish, Polynesian, Japanese, Filipino. He was
twenty-five years old on that afternoon, squat and thick necked and muscular, with a face like an Olmec head come to life.
To Arielle’s immediate left in the photo was Winston Stickney, the son of Virgin Islanders who had emigrated to Brooklyn. At thirty-one, he was the oldest in the group. A receding hairline added a few more years to his apparent age. He wore glasses with thick black rims and stood in a slightly awkward slouch, and his clothing was exceptionally unstylish, a white shirt over baggy gabardine trousers. It was the look of an ascetic intellectual, and this wasn’t deceiving: he held advanced degrees in engineering and Russian literature. But Stickney was also a warrior, a former U.S. Army Ranger, an expert in high explosives and demolition, a decorated marksman with pistol and rifle.
To Stickney’s left stood Ray Favor. He was an inch over six feet, broad shouldered and trim. His face was taut, with a sharp jaw and angular brow over deep-set eyes. His ruddy complexion and straight black hair were legacies of a Nez Percé grandmother who had married into a family of ranchers in eastern Oregon. Like Stickney, Favor had an impressive military background, with eight years in the U.S. Marines, the last five of them in the USMC Recon battalion. Ray Favor was the most focused person Arielle had ever known, and his intensity was obvious in the photo. Even in celebration, Favor’s eyes had a predatory glint, feral and fierce. He seemed ready to pounce.
After a year of individual preparation, they had been brought together as a group for the first time that weekend to take part in a mock field exercise, and they had performed beyond all expectations. It was a critical moment for their future in the covert Bravo Cell program.
Bravo Cell was a rarity among America’s security and intelligence agencies. It was a secret entity that actually remained secret. Its funds were skimmed from the discretionary budgets of the better-known agencies, allowing Bravo to operate off the official ledgers, invisible to committees and commissions. Beginning in the early 1970s, Bravo sent teams of three to five agents into foreign lands under deep cover to undertake the nation’s riskiest and most sensitive tasks, the darkest of black ops: kidnapping, sabotage, assassination. Bravo agents were multilingual, highly intelligent, adaptable, and resourceful. They were also fully deniable. They traveled plausibly under the passports of various nations, performing missions that often required them to remain undercover for weeks.
The program’s name was never officially explained, but the dry inside joke was that Bravo—the military’s phonetic “B”—actually stood for “buried.” It could refer to a team’s operational status, so deep undercover that it disappeared. But for an unsuccessful cell, “buried” was literally the outcome. No rescue was forthcoming if Bravo agents were exposed and captured. From the U.S. government, a compromised Bravo agent could expect only disavowal.
When a Bravo cell went undercover, it was cut off
from outside aid, its members totally dependent on one another. A mistake by any one of them usually meant torture and death for all. The arrangement demanded absolute trust and loyalty within the team. The directors of the program studied individual trainees for about a year before matching them to prospective teams for a second year of training as a group. These assignments were tentative, and the trainers often tinkered with team rosters, seeking the elusive personal chemistry that was essential to a cell in the field.
But from the first day they met as a group, nobody tinkered with the team of Bouchard, Favor, Stickney, and Mendonza. Their collective strength as a team—their
rightness
—was obvious to all who observed them.
After a year together in training, completing a series of increasingly difficult mock assignments, they received their first actual mission. This was a noteworthy event. In more than twenty years, Bravo trainers had sent only eighteen teams out into the world on their missions of deception and mayhem and death. From that day forward, the team of Bouchard, Favor, Stickney, and Mendonza would forever be known among themselves, and to their few handlers and superiors, as Bravo One Nine.
After he put the photo back on Arielle’s desk, Favor went into his office and shut the door.
Something was wrong with him. Arielle could sense it.
He had been acting oddly for about a week and
a half, preoccupied and distant. It was totally out of character. In the sixteen years that she had known him, Favor was always fully engaged, always completely in the moment. Always.
And now this unreal exchange as he held the photo in his hands.
The shit that keeps you awake at night if you dwell on it.
He had never before spoken this way about his time with One Nine.
Two hours passed, and Favor didn’t come out.
The office building had once been a lodge, the main residence of a luxury vacation compound. Favor had bought the property six years earlier and converted the lodge to an informal office building, the headquarters of his private investment holding company. The company had five full-time employees, of whom Arielle was by far the most important. It was a minuscule staff relative to the company’s revenues, which for the previous twelve months totaled nearly thirty million dollars.
Ray Favor was a very rich man.
His career as an investor had begun ten years earlier, when the members of Bravo One Nine resigned after five years of service, a consensus decision.
Favor was then thirty-four years old. He had a modest inheritance and some savings from unspent salary that had accumulated during his time undercover. He also owned a quarter share of $2.6 million in Krugerrands that the cell had acquired and secretly cached several years earlier, during one of their missions. It was money that no living soul would ever miss. Covert operations occasionally created
such opportunities. When they disbanded, the stash of gold became a severance bonus for the four members of One Nine, none of whom had ever known any employer besides the U.S. government.
Favor used part of the money as down payment on an apartment block in Seattle. Within weeks, he sold the building and tripled his investment. He tripled it again with a quick series of land swaps and purchases. Favor found that he had an uncanny sense of impending value in real estate. His cunning and guile and unshakable nerve, developed over years under deep cover, also served him well. They made business almost too easy.
He continued to prosper. After about a year, Arielle accepted his offer to work with him. The salary was generous, and she received a ten percent share of his newly formed holding company. And she earned it. Arielle ran his office, kept his books, hired his staff, dealt with his bankers and attorneys.
When Favor bought the Tahoe property, he chose a corner room in the lodge for his personal office. The room had a magnificent westerly view that took in the lake with the gray granite ramparts of the Sierras on the far side. It was a few steps from Arielle’s office, a larger room with a slightly less expansive view.
From her desk, Arielle looked across a hall to the half-open door of Favor’s office. Now three hours had passed since he had disappeared inside. Not a word, not a rustle. This was unusual. Favor didn’t like to be desk-bound. He often ducked in and out
of his room a dozen times a day, prowling the building, pacing around the property outside.
She shuffled through a stack of folders, chose one, and walked out and across the hall.
She paused at his door.
Favor’s office was dark and completely still. She must have somehow missed him slipping out.
Then she noticed a shadowy figure at one edge of the big window, standing so quietly, so completely motionless, that she had to look twice to be sure. At first she thought that he was gazing outside, absorbed in the view. But the slump of his shoulders and the cant of his head, and his eerie stillness, made Arielle think that he wasn’t really seeing the lake
at all.
Ray Favor was zoning out. She paused at the threshold, expecting him to notice her at any time. Favor was always alert to the presence of others, and Arielle knew that his hyperawareness had preserved his life more than once. But now he seemed oblivious. Several seconds passed, and he still didn’t move. She felt like an intruder, a voyeur to some private, unguarded moment.
She stepped into the office, moving briskly, making more noise than necessary as she crossed the hardwood floor. This finally got his attention. His head turned toward her as she approached his desk.
“Appraisals on the Santa Barbara purchase,” Arielle said, showing him the sheaf of papers. “No surprises, but you might want to review it anyway.”
He watched her as she put the folder on his desk.
“And the Tulsa boys will be here in forty-five minutes,” she said. “You want something to eat first?”
After a pause that seemed much too long, Favor shook his head.
“Nothing?” she said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Hey, Ray,” she said. “You okay?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Something on your mind?”
“No more or less than usual.”
“Right,” she said. She started to leave and was almost out the door when he spoke again.
He said, “Life’s a bitch—you know that, Ari?”
She stopped and manufactured a smile as she turned to look back at him.
“That’s the rumor,” she said, trying to keep her tone light. But she was thinking:
Who are you? And what have you done to Ray Favor?
It happened again an hour later.
They were in a conference room on the second floor. Favor sat in a leather swivel chair at one end of a long table with Arielle beside him, taking notes, as three developers from Tulsa made a presentation at the other end.
The developers wanted to build a luxury hunting retreat and gun club on 2,800 acres of scrubland in southeast Kansas that Favor had owned for about a year. Rough and rocky, the land had never been cultivated. This had made it inexpensive for Favor
to buy, and it was perfect for the developers’ plans. Favor had declined their offer to buy the land at what would have been a quadruple profit. Now they were back with an offer of an equity position, part ownership. It would be a windfall for Favor.
One of the developers, a man named Terry, was pitching the proposal, ticking off details as he paged through a PowerPoint deck on a wall-mounted LCD.
He stopped halfway through one of the screens.
He said: “Mr. Favor? Sir?”
Arielle looked at Favor and saw that he was leaning back in the chair, fingers laced behind his head.
His eyes were closed.
“Mr. Favor? Should I repeat that last part? I’ll be glad to go back a couple of screens,” Terry said. He sounded slightly peevish.
Favor didn’t respond right away—at least, not so that anyone else would notice. But Arielle caught the slight rumpling of his mouth and the tightening at the corners of his eyes. He was back in focus now. And he wouldn’t like that tone.