William Tyree - Line of Succession

She got up from the table. She took a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from the rack. She grabbed her keys, already imagining the rhythm of the gentle marina waves lapping up against the hull.

Baltimore

The apartment had taken on the permanent odor of mushroom soup and baked beans. They had eaten the combo for every meal, and Angie had come to dread the sound of pots and pans in the kitchen. But maybe the fact that they were feeding her meant they weren’t going to kill her after all.

Elvir came to her with yet another helping. “Hungry?” he asked her.

She nodded wearily. Then she smiled — not because she liked him, but because she thought that he might be less willing to kill her if she was nice. To her surprise, he held a container of honey vanilla yogurt. “This is the good kind,” he said as he opened it. “No corn syrup.”

He spooned some into her mouth. She swallowed. He pushed another bite toward her, but she moved her head aside and spoke. “Just tell me one thing,” she said. “You were trying to kill us. So why didn’t you let me drown?”

He contemplated his words carefully before speaking. He spooned more of the yogurt into her mouth and said, “I am fully trained on the Stinger missile. Trust me, Misses Jackson. Had I wanted to kill you and your family, my aim would have been true.”

PART III

“The only matter that could take Egypt to war again is water.”

Assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat

Baltimore Outskirts

Tuesday 4:45 a.m. Eastern

Two Maryland National Guardsmen stood next to an eight-wheeled Stryker fighting vehicle. Three hundred feet of razor wire and a few construction barricades stretched across the six-lane interstate leading into Baltimore. Less than 60 feet away, the remains of a Chevy pickup truck burned. They had blown it up an hour earlier.

Two stray dogs chewed a foot that had been blown off the driver near the debris. One of the construction signs flashed TURN BACK — CURFEW STRICTLY ENFORCED.

A set of headlights appeared in the distance. The sight of the burning truck had warded off every single approaching vehicle since they had attacked it around midnight. But this one — a black Humvee — came within fifty yards before it eventually stopped.

The two guardsmen squinted as Chris Abrams stepped out of the Hummer. His arms were raised above his head. The sun was rising in the east, but the half-light made it twice as hard to see. One of the guardsmen switched on the spotlight, and they saw Abrams’ closely cropped head and his Ulysses uniform. He was clutching an ID card.

They kept their guns on Abrams even as he drew close and they could see his battle fatigues.

“La Familia?” one of the guardsmen said, meaning Ulysses.

“Yep,” Abrams said. “Joint Ops called us into Baltimore. You wanna see the orders?”

He handed over his ID and manufactured travel authorization. The guardsmen passed it between them although they scarcely examined it. “Look how ripped he is,” one of the guardsmen said in astonished Spanish. “Even his head is ripped!”

Unfortunately for the guardsmen, Abrams understood Spanish perfectly. His head was not in fact “ripped,” at least not in the traditional sense. Facial wasting, a side effect of his particular strain of HIV, caused his body fat to be improperly distributed. Abrams was incredibly self-conscious about it, as he was often falsely accused of being on steroids. Some years ago, he’d even undergone painful collagen injections to beef up his facial features, but the improvements were only fleeting.

Abrams was not the name he had been born with, but it was the name his employer had given him. For the past few years he had inhabited Christian Merrill Abrams so completely that, for the most part, he had forgotten that he had once been known as Henry and had been a prison guard in a small Wyoming town. After racking up too much debt, he had left his family for a year to make a hundred thousand dollars working for Blackwater, the American contract militia that had become so notorious on the streets of Baghdad.

The first thing that surprised him about Iraq was the heat. Abrams had trained in Yuma, Arizona, during the month of May, which was positively hellish for a man who had been brought up in Wyoming. But the training did little to prepare him for the 130-degree heat that hit him like a hydrogen blast upon arriving in Baghdad.

More surprising was that his crew was under fire nearly every day. It didn’t help that they were assigned to protect an Iraqi interpreter who had been discovered cooperating with the Americans. The interpreter lasted about three weeks. He was killed by an RPG when Abrams was off duty. Abrams was called to an unrefrigerated morgue to identify the man’s face and one of his colleagues. After that, he volunteered for units that took “proactive” assignments to ensure a target’s safety.

Sixteen kills and twelve months later, Abrams returned to find that his wife and young son had suddenly relocated and did not want to be found. Abrams’ wife had left a terse note explaining that she had transferred everything he had earned from the joint bank account, but that she had carefully signed over the house and both cars to him and left the papers in a folder on top of the refrigerator. Abrams searched for his family for three weeks, interrogating friends and relatives, sometimes at gunpoint. During one such episode, in which he tied up one of his wife’s cousins in her mobile home, he had actually shot a Golden Retriever.

He served a four-month prison sentence for gross animal cruelty in Wyoming. It was there in the state pen that Abrams reckoned that he contracted HIV from another inmate, although he did not show symptoms for at least another year.

During his incarceration, government contracts were there for the taking and need for experienced soldiers was dire. Some of the major American security firms had taken to trolling the prison system for able-bodied former military with combat training and imminent release dates. A rap sheet with murder, grand larceny and anything sexually related automatically disqualified a candidate. But fortunately for Chris Abrams, Ulysses was able to look past animal cruelty. His prior combat experience and lack of family ties made him an ideal candidate.

He was offered jobs of varying levels by three firms in the weeks before his release. Having read about Ulysses’ rapid rise in a Web news article, Abrams held out for a hefty salary and a big signing bonus. Not because he would have refused a lower offer, but because he enjoyed the negotiation. The truth was that he wanted nothing more than to get back into the action. He would have done it for free.

By the time that his HIV was discovered by the Ulysses medical staff, his reputation as a strategist who could also personally execute complex assassinations was considered essential. He was guaranteed the best possible medical care and a promise not to share his secret with anyone.

Now Abrams eyed the charred truck. “What happened to those guys?” he asked the guardsmen. “They get a little too close for comfort?”

The taller of the two handed Abrams his Ulysses ID. “No habla ingles.”

Abrams laughed, stunned at the idea that the National Guard was employing active duty soldiers that didn’t speak any English at all. He switched to Spanish. “You’ve gotta be shitting me,” he said in a Juarez, Mexico dialect. “I knew recruiting was down, but this…” He felt the men tense up. “I mean, holy shit, right?”

The guardsmen didn’t find this funny. They had been picked up by the border patrol in June and given a choice between being deported to Mexico or cutting an amnesty deal that would include six years of National Guard service. At the end of their service, they were to receive green cards. Neither men had thought twice about the decision, even though they realized they could be deployed to a combat zone.