Authors: Gabby Grant
Carolyn cleared her throat and Maria looked up. “We know,
Maria. Know about the limousine. You’re being blackmailed, aren’t you?”
John sat silently waiting for Maria to respond. As an
attorney, he was prohibited by code from saying anything too leading. Carolyn,
on the other hand, had liberal jurisdiction at the DOS. And, if she made a
little slip or two in protocol, John could rest easy that Steve Alexander
wouldn’t get it down on paper.
As if on cue, Steve shook and glared at his pen, then
scratched its point hard against his pad of paper.
John arched his brow, as Maria looked nervously around the
room at the faces surrounding her.
“Dry,” John announced, looking up.
“No worries, Sergeant,” Carolyn said, patting the small
recorder on the table in front of her. “I’m getting it all on tape. No doubt
Mr. Neal is going to want to hear every word.” She cast a piercing look in
Maria’s direction and the middle-aged woman quivered.
“I say, ees not like you think... It’s...Mr. Neal, he--”
“What about Mr. Neal?” John James pressed.
Maria chomped down on her lower lip with her teeth and began
fumbling with the hemline of her skirt, smoothing it out so it covered every
inch of her knees.
“What I don’t get,” Sergeant Alexander cut in, “is how you
could do it
?!
I’ve got a little girl myself, not much older than Isabel...”
Carolyn watched Maria crumble at the mention of Isabel’s
name and decided in an instant Steve Alexander’s talents
were being
wasted in his current position.
“Here, here,” Carolyn said, standing and coming around the
table, as Maria wept freely into her hands
.
“It’s going to be alright.”
“I didn’t know,” the sniveling woman pleaded. “Swear I
didn’t know what else to do. Pepe, he’s all I have.”
Carolyn laid her free hand on Maria’s shoulder and cast her
eyes on John who was sharing a look with Steve. “No Maria,
you have Mr.
Neal and his wife, too. Isabel-”
Another dissolving heap of tears.
“Isabel,” Carolyn said again, as Maria righted herself and
grabbed another fistful of tissues from the box on the table, “is going to be
alright. We are all here to help you, Maria.
You, your Pepe,
and the Neal’s.
All you’ve got to do is tell us what you know.”
***
Carolyn Walker paced the narrow hallway, thinking. It would
upset Isabel now to replace her caretaker. Particularly since both her parents
were mysteriously missing and the baby had begun a nightly routine of calling
for her “mama” with wellspring eyes.
Carolyn sighed and tugged at her collar. While the DOS
laundry service had provided her with clean uniforms daily, she longed more
than anything to get back home and into a pair of jeans. She hoped her younger
sister, Rebecca, was truthfully looking after her cats. Becky, who was just
nineteen and a student at the nearby university, was not always the most
reliable pet-sitter.
It was a poor reflection of her life, she realized, that she
had no one else to miss her besides two over-fed felines. But, ever since
returning from Kuwait, twice-decorated Major Carolyn Walker hadn’t had much of
a life at all outside the US Army. She’d been to Texas, through advanced
officer training school in Arizona, and, thanks to her wartime service, been
able to escape being assigned to Korea altogether.
The best time Carolyn had had in a long while had been in
Panama, and that had been more a decade ago. There’d been a Marine there,
someone she’d thought she could care about.
Someone who,
quite unfortunately, didn’t appear to return the feeling.
Carolyn squared her shoulders out of habit and walked into
the cubicle-like kitchen, hunting for a soda. Mark’s division secretary, Alice,
was with the baby and Maria was still downstairs with Sergeant Alexander while
everybody tried to decide what to do with her.
In reality, what Maria had been able to tell them wasn’t
much help. She was being blackmailed
alright
.
Blackmailed into passing along information about Mark Neal’s family. She’d been
lied to, though. Told it was a personal investigation, an information gathering
process only- that would bring no harm to the Neals or their baby.
She’d revealed some of Ana’s personal and computer habits,
strange things that seemed unrelated and didn’t appear to do any harm. How Ms.
Kane spent her free time, how she routinely entered her home...
Once Ana had disappeared, though, Maria’d
panicked,
fearing the information she’d been passing along had somehow played a part.
She’d gone into hiding with Isabel because she was scared. And, because, as
strange as it was to fathom, Carolyn did believe she loved the baby.
Maria’s point of contact had been a man only known to her as
El Lobo.
As he’d always sat in the front of the limousine and listened,
she’d never actually seen his face. He’d never spoken either. Only listened,
which Maria had found spooky and strange.
The driver, a dark-skinned
middle-easterner
,
she thought, did all the talking, asked all the questions. He was the one who
took her calls and handed over the envelopes in payment for information. As far
as Maria knew, the Arab didn’t have a name, only the lethal black eyes of the
devil. How he and
El Lobo
had found out about Pepe’s heart condition,
she didn’t know. How they’d discerned the exact amounts of her escalating
medical bills and scheduled their “payments” to meet them, she didn’t know
either.
Carolyn sat at the small kitchen table and popped the top on
her soda can. Telling Neal now would just give him one more thing to worry
about, and he had enough headaches as it was. Besides, no matter what
information Maria had given away, including her most recent revelation about
Isabel’s location, the baby was safe. Carolyn had assured Mark the DIPAC was a
fortress and she’d been right. Now that security had been alerted, they were
ready and on the alert. No way in hell anybody could get in here now, no matter
what they knew.
***
Mark spun onto Highway 29 and gunned it north toward
Washington.
“Not going to make it all the way there in this heap,”
Albert said.
“No, sir. This is where being Assistant Director at DOS is
bound to have its perks.”
He turned
and smiled at his father-in-law, who seemed to be breathing a lot easier now
that the danger had passed and they hadn’t appeared to pick up a tail.
Albert grabbed for the car phone with a smile. “Gotcha,” he
said, punching in the numbers. He ordered that a replacement car be readied for
them and supplied just past the juncture of the next town.
“What’s been bothering you, son?” Albert asked as Mark
wheeled their new car onto Interstate 66, heading north. “You’ve scarcely said
a word since the river.”
Mark set his jaw, but kept his eye on the four-lane road
where traffic blurred by on his right-hand side. Even though he was doing
eighty in a sixty-five, Mark knew he wouldn’t get a ticket. “This McFadden
thing. What was it exactly McFadden was doing in the Middle East?”
“Tom didn’t say. Only mentioned the Rub Al Khali Desert.”
“Home of Al Fahd’s terrorist training camp?”
“Among others,” Albert shrugged.
“Among others with such open hostility toward the United
States?”
“Probably not.”
Albert cracked his window. “I think Joe’s mission had something to do
with BW.”
“Biological warfare?” Mark asked, cutting across three lanes
of traffic and swerving onto an exit ramp.
Albert looked over his shoulder as car horns blared, but
said nothing.
“What kind?” Mark asked.
Albert let out a long, slow
breath
as their car eased to a stop at the top of the exit ramp. “Or maybe, chemical
weapons...I don’t know.
Something that was being
investigated.
This was a Company project, Mark. And even as the DOS AD,
you know I had limited-”
“...
need
to know,” Mark finished
for him. “How about Mooney’s involvement?”
“He’s Joe’s uncle, for crying out loud.”
“Professional?”
Albert shook his head. “Not in McFadden’s troubles.”
Not in McFadden’s...
Without warning, Mark peeled the
car off of the road and careened onto the shoulder. Albert clutched his
shoulder strap as pavement grated and tires squealed to a halt.
“What in the hell was that supposed to mean,” Mark asked,
pursing his lips and turning to his father-in-law.
Albert hung his head.
“Mooney had a theory about this intelligence scare. And I’m
damn well afraid,” Albert said, looking up, “he’s right.”
Tom Mooney
returned from the water cooler and sat at his desk, studying the beige and
brown map of the Rub Al Khali Desert. Somewhere out there, Joe McFadden had
disappeared, filtering into the landscape like one more feckless grain of sand.
Somewhere out there, Tom’s only nephew and the only family he had, had
characteristically taken things into his own hands and unwittingly placed
himself in grave danger.
Tom’s fist tightened around the paper cup, sending water
sloshing over its reverberating sides.
More than a decade ago, the three of them had devised a
plan. Twelve years ago exactly Tom, his old intelligence corps buddy Albert
Kane, and Tom’s long-term liaison from his “Flying Tigers” days in China, Au
Yang, had been directed by the Bush Administration to concoct a scenario that
would guarantee US Intelligence supremacy around the globe.
It had been December 1989 and the Brandenburg Gate had just
reopened to the West. But while the joy of fallen communism resonated from
rooftops world-wide,
it’s
euphoria did not settle on
the White House. Following in his predecessor’s footsteps, President Bush
worried over communism’s ever-pervasive threat. Now that the Berlin Wall had
fallen, the West was expected to let down its guard and tighten the belt on the
burgeoning military budget that had been given free reign during the previous
administration. Not if DOD could help it. And a couple of boys at the Pentagon
had the perfect plan.
The perfect plan involving a
little-known agency on the East bank of the Potomac whose resources were at the
Commander-in-Chief’s beck and call.
All it took was a series of plausibly deniable meetings no
one could trace back to the President. When the order funneled down the
pipeline to the DOS, seasoned specialist Albert Kane, then a supposed college
professor in
Delaware,
was put in charge of a special
task force. It was an elite team, only the three of them: Albert Kane, Tom
Mooney and Tom’s old Chinese blood brother Au Yang, who’d recently escaped
incarceration in China.
While the newly-commissioned World War II OSS officer Albert
Kane had been masterminding covert operations in Spain, the man he would meet
two years later and who would become his best friend for life, Tom Mooney, was
spiriting into China with the 14th Army Air Force under the auspices of a
covert mission to aid the Chinese against their Japanese invaders. Because they
were among the
best of the best
,
both Kane and Mooney
had been snagged by the DOS near the end of the war
. They’d been put
through the DOS clearinghouse in Puerto Rico together and there had formed an
irrefutable bond. They were cut from the same cloth, Mooney and Albert Kane.
Vain, spirited, ambitious, and dyed-in-the wool loyalists to the
USA.
They’d gone on to marry equally dynamic women, but in spite of
their friendship- or perhaps, more aptly, because of it- the DOS had seen fit
to keep Tom and Albert apart.
Au Yang, Tom had later learned, had been sentenced to life
imprisonment by the Chinese for his work as a
double-agent
during the War. It didn’t matter that his work for the Americans had in fact
benefitted China. What mattered was that he’d seized the open opportunity on
his own, without express permission from his commanders or his regime. For over
forty years, Au Yang had wasted away in a red block cell until he’d been
granted that unexpected break for freedom and defected instantly to the United
States, where’d he’d sought out his old American ally Tom Mooney.
Tom’s recruitment of Au Yang to the Defense Operations
Service had garnered him many kudos, yet still not enough for Tom to out-pace
his friend Albert Kane’s rise to power within the top-secret organization. When
it had been the DOS commander’s brainstorm in 1989 to
hand-pick
those three for their highly classified operation, kingpin Albert Kane had
naturally been put in charge. Though he’d never told Albert so, Tom had
secretly hoped to head up that project. It had been Tom, not Albert after all,
who’d had the Chinese connection. Tom, not Albert, who’d initially recruited Au
Yang to the DOS and could therefore most notably influence his Chinese friend
into participation in their plan.
Having Au Yang’s input was critical to the group’s success.
In order to tackle a global infrastructure, the team would need a non-western
perspective- something Au Yang could quite astutely supply. Particularly as he
was eager to seek revenge against a regime that had held him captive so long his
hair had grown snowy white without him having had the opportunity to observe
that change in a mirror. Not only had he been denied the privilege of his own
reflection, as ghastly as it must have looked at times, Au Yang had also been
prohibited from engaging in human contact with others. Unjustly, he’d been
branded a traitor. And, as such, kept in solitary confinement for more years
than he could count on his fingers and toes two times over. Then came that
fateful night of the fire and the wild rampage down the hall by fleeing
prisoners, one of whom had had the good grace to throw open wide the door to Au
Yang’s cell along his own barreling path to freedom.