Andrew Britton: The Invisible

After admiring the view for a few minutes more, Kealey pulled open the door and nodded hello to the plump, smiling receptionist. She returned the gesture and went back to her crossword puzzle as he climbed the stairs, making his way up to the bar on the second floor. The worn oak doors were propped open, dim light flickering into the hall. Stepping into the room, he pulled off his wool knit watch cap, ran a hand through his lank black hair, and started toward the bar. The walls were paneled in pale oak, uninspired prints hanging around the room and above the fireplace, where a small fire was burning. The dark green couches, shiny with wear, complemented the worn carpet perfectly, and burgundy velvet drapes hung behind the bar itself, where a morose young man stood guard behind the small selection of taps. Kealey had just finished ordering a beer when he sensed movement over by one of the large windows. He turned and stared for a few seconds, appraising the solitary figure. Then he lifted a hand in cautious greeting. Turning back to the bar, he revised his order, his mind racing. Less than a minute later he was walking across the room, a pint glass in each hand, wondering what might have brought this particular visitor halfway around the world. Jonathan Harper was seated with his back to the wall, his right foot hooked casually over his left knee. He was dressed in dark jeans, Merrell hiking boots, and a gray V-neck sweater, but despite his youthful attire, the deputy DCI—the second-highest-ranking official in the Central Intelligence Agency—looked far older than his fortythree years. His neat brown hair was just starting to gray at the temples, but his face was gaunt, and his skin was shockingly pale. His mannerisms were even more noticeable. He seemed shaky and slightly guarded, but also resigned, like an old man who senses the end is near. All of this was to be expected, though, and Kealey knew it could have been worse. In truth, the man was extremely lucky to still be alive.

Kealey placed the beers on the water-stained table, shrugged off his jacket, and slid into the opposite seat. They appraised each other for a long moment. Finally, Harper offered a slight smile and extended a hand, which the younger man took.

“Good to see you, Ryan. It’s been a long time.”

“I suppose so,” Kealey said. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms in a casual way. “About seven months, I guess. When did you get here?”

“I flew into Keflavík this morning, but the bus only arrived a few hours ago.”

“Sorry to keep you waiting. How have you been?”

“Not bad, all things considered.” Harper took a short pull on his lager, coughed sharply, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “The doctors are happy enough, so I guess that’s something.”

“And Julie?”

“She’s fine. I think she secretly enjoys having a patient again, though she’d never admit it.”

“Knowing her, it wouldn’t surprise me at all,” Kealey replied. He knew that Harper’s wife had worked for years as a head nurse at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, one of the best hospitals in the country. The smile faded from his face as he debated going forward with his next question. Finally, he went ahead and asked it.

“What about Jane Doe? Any luck on that front?”

“Not a thing. I’m starting to think we’ll never find her. Even if we did, it’s not like we could hand her over to the FBI. There just isn’t enough evidence to charge her with anything. They never found the gun, you know.”

Kealey nodded slowly. Eight months earlier, the newly appointed deputy director had narrowly survived an assassination attempt in Washington, D.C. The attack had taken place on the front step of his brownstone on General’s Row, just as he was stretching after his morning run. Harper had been facing away from his armed assailant when the first shot was fired. The .22-caliber round penetrated his lower back, then ricocheted off the third rib and up through the right lung. The second and third rounds had torn into his upper arm as he turned toward the shooter, and the fourth had punched a hole in his chest, missing his heart by less than an inch. The woman had been moving forward as she fired, and by the time the fourth round left the muzzle of her gun, she was less than 10 feet from her target. As she approached to fire the fatal shot, a D.C. Metro police cruiser had squealed to a halt on Q Street, lights flashing. The police officer’s arrival on the scene had been pure chance, nothing but luck, but it had saved the deputy director’s life. The woman fired at the officer as he stepped out of the vehicle, killing him instantly, but the distraction gave Julie Harper—who had been making coffee when the first shots were fired—the chance to open the door and pull her husband inside to safety. Unfortunately, the would-be assassin managed to escape in the ensuing chaos, even though the Metro Police Department was able to seal off the surrounding streets with astonishing speed. What followed was one of the largest manhunts in U.S. history, but despite the enormous resources it had thrown into the search, the government had yet to track her down. The CIA had looked harder and longer than anyone else, of course, and in time, they’d managed to dig up a few tenuous leads. “Jane Doe” had been involved with a former Special Forces soldier named William Vanderveen. In 1997, while on deployment in Syria, Vanderveen had made the decision to sell his skills to some of the world’s most dangerous terrorist organizations. From that point forward, he’d earned—through countless acts of cold-blooded murder—his status as one of the most wanted men in the world. The connection between Vanderveen and the would-be assassin was based on photographs taken in London by Britain’s Security Service, MI5. The men who took the shots were assigned to “A” branch, Section 4, the “Five”

unit tasked with domestic surveillance. The shots showed Vanderveen and the unknown woman walking side by side in the heart of the city, but despite the excellent image resolution, the photographs had proved useless. The Agency’s facial recognition software had failed to find a reliable match in the database. MI5, the French DGSE, and the Israeli Mossad had also come up empty, as had a number of other friendly intelligence services.

In other words, the woman was a black hole, a nonentity. Kealey knew how much it bothered Harper that she’d never been caught, but as he’d just said, there had been no progress on that front. This realization brought Kealey to his next point.

“John, it’s good to see you again, but what exactly are you doing here?”

The deputy director didn’t respond right away. Instead, he picked up his beer and swirled the contents thoughtfully.

“I’m surprised to hear you ask me that first,” he finally said. “I thought you might be wondering how I found you.” He looked up and studied the younger man. “You know, I have a few questions of my own. For instance, I’d like to know why you haven’t set foot on U.S. soil in two and a half months. I mean, I spend half that time looking for you, and when I finally catch up, I find you . . .” He trailed off and lifted his arms, as if to include the whole country. There was an unspoken question there, but Kealey wasn’t sure how to answer it. When he’d set out three months earlier, it was without a plan. Without a real idea of what he was looking for. But whatever it was, he’d found it on the alpine tundra and the vast, seemingly endless ice fields of Iceland. He’d found it in Alaska, Tanzania, Patagonia, and all the other places he’d seen in recent months. For lack of a better word, it was solitude, the kind of terrain where one could walk for days without hearing a sound other than the wind. It was what he had wanted at the time—what he still wanted, to a certain degree—and he couldn’t explain why. Naomi’s disappearance had played a role, but that was only part of it. Something else had instilled in him the desire to get away from it all, though he had yet to identify the secondary cause for his restless behavior.