William Tyree - Line of Succession

Once back in the tunnels, Speers allowed himself a moment to rest. It was then that he realized how much pain he was really in. His body wasn’t cut out for this. His arms ached. His sinuses felt ready to burst. The balls of his feet were swollen and his socks were wet with the pus from the broken blisters on his toes and heels.

He eventually made his way through the tunnels until he came upon the portal to the Metro Center subway station. There he slipped seamlessly into the stream of passengers rushing to get home before the 8 p.m. curfew. The Blue Line to Franconia swooshed into the station.

Ulysses could not be far behind. Speers cut to the head of the line. Despite a palpable agitation among the passengers enduring a third night of martial law, nobody challenged him. In fact, his fellow commuters gave him wide berth. What was this, some show of respect? He wasn’t used to being recognized on the street. Outside the Federal Buildings, he was a nobody.

When the subway pulled in and Speers glimpsed himself in the car’s metallic reflection, he understood. He saw the chigger bites on his neck and head. The grass-stained shirt. The mud-caked shoes. The Albert Einstein hairdo. He smelled the mildew on his shirt. Nobody got out of his way out of respect. No. Quite the opposite.

Fort Campbell Gym

Elvir Divac writhed on the tattered brown incline weight bench. Agent Carver stood over him and clamped his dental pliers around one of Divac’s rear molars. The Bosnian was close to cracking.

Torture was far from Carver’s standard operating procedure. During his career with CIA, he had gladly employed psychological conditioning tactics to weaken prisoners’ resolve. He had never resorted to physical torture, however, and although the Supreme Court had decided that pulling a prisoner’s perfectly healthy teeth was simply called dentistry, Carver had no such illusions. What he was doing was not just morally repugnant; it was evil.

But the country was not merely suffering terrorist attacks from some foreign coalition or a few madmen. This was far more serious. Carver didn’t have the luxury of time, and he was willing to do anything he had to — including hurting Elvir Divac for a while — to get to the bottom of it.

Carver gave the molar a final yank and stood with the bloody prize between the tool’s pincers. Divac screamed so loud that Carver could hardly hear himself speak. “That’s two,” Carver said as he dropped the molar to the floor, where it bounced like a wet marble. “Just twenty-six more to go.”

Divac pursed his lips, determined not to let Carver’s pliers back into his mouth. Carver took hold of Divac’s right nipple, squeezed and turned it to the left. He waited until Divac screamed, then jammed the pliers in and gripped a third molar. He put his knee on the prisoner’s chest for leverage, and then began to tug on the tooth in earnest.

Divac muttered something that sounded like surrender. Carver pulled the pliers out and wiped the sweat from his forehead. The prisoner spit a mouthful of blood and saliva out onto his hospital gown.

Carver let him catch his breath, then asked for the third time, “Who gave you the Stingers?”

“They’re going to kill me for this.”

“I’ll kill you too, but much, much slower.”

The Bosnian spit more blood. His left cheek was puffy, pushed out by the swelling of his gums. “I was back from my third tour,” he started. “They had me in Walter Reed Hospital. I applied for a visa back to Bosnia. I just wanted to go home. One day a man came. I swear I don’t know his name.”

“What did he look like?”

“His head was smooth…shaved. He looked like he worked out a lot. I could see his muscles even in his neck, his face. Like one of those muscle men, sort of. But he also looked a little thin. And a little sick. I don’t know how to explain.”

Chris Abrams, Carver thought. He seemed to be everywhere. “Why did he come see you?”

“I thought it was for the visa, but no. Instead he offered seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

“For what?”

“To learn a dead language. And stage a mock attack on the Secretary of Defense.”

“ Mock attack?”

“In Chesapeake Bay, yes. Secretary Jackson was to believe his life was threatened. But no one was to get hurt.”

“You’re lying.”

Divac was insulted. “I have fifty-six kills between Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq. I shot down four helicopters. All my kills were by sniper rifle or Stinger Missile. Sometimes in winter weather. I ask you, how could I miss a white fishing boat on such a clear day?”

Carver heard the door. He looked up and saw Colonel Madsen. Eva was close behind him. She surveyed the bloody scene with an expression that was somewhat cold and practical.

The doctor was not so forgiving. He ran in behind her, spotted the bleeding prisoner, and pushed Carver away. “This is a war crime!” he said as he searched his medical kit for a piece of gauze. “I’ll be reporting this.”

But Eva had no time for it: “Doctor, get Mister Divac ready to travel. And you’ll be coming too.”

“Travel?” the Doc shot back. “This man has been tortured!”

“He’s living, breathing proof of a conspiracy to overthrow the government,” Eva said. “I’m not about to go into Rapture Run empty handed.”

Washington D.C.

11:10 p.m.

Just a block away from the typically hopping Adam’s Morgan nightlife, Speers crawled from a storm drain, scurried to the dark side of the street and stretched his back. The sidewalks were empty. Somewhere in the distance, machine gun fire crackled for an instant and then went silent. He eventually straightened himself and began walking cautiously toward home.

It was another hot and humid evening in the swampy Capitol city. The Chief got to his feet and made his way to the sidewalk. For the first time in years, Speers’ pants were actually a little loose around his waist. He stopped to tighten his belt a notch and fell off-balance, realizing his own exhaustion. Apart from the lollipop that he salvaged from his Eisenhower Building office, he had not eaten a meal in nearly twenty-four hours, and he had eaten only sparingly in the day and evening before that.

He spotted a water fountain. It had been at least eight hours since he had taken a drink of anything. He bent over the fountain’s cool stream of city-treated water and stood there a good long while to quench his thirst until his belly was so full that he felt the water sloshing inside as he began walking again.

Someone whistled. Speers looked left and saw a man with a dirty face peering out from a cardboard box. The man motioned him closer, but Speers kept his distance. “Stay out of the light,” the man called out. “They’re patrolling this street every couple minutes. They tried to knife me, but I got away from the bastards.”

“Who?”

“Ulysses!” the man cried. “It’s martial law, loser! Where’ve you been?”

Speers crossed to the other side of the street, where there were fewer lights. He stank of perspiration. He had been absentmindedly scratching the chigger bites on his neck, arms, legs and thighs for hours. He needed a shower and fresh clothes, and more than anything else, shoes. But the stores had long closed, and Speers reckoned it was perhaps fifteen minutes walking to his Georgetown brownstone. Problem was, his home wouldn’t be any safer than his Eisenhower Building office had been.

He considered DC310, the field house where there was an entire closet full of new shoes. But any government location was fraught with its own set of risks. Besides, Ulysses’ people had already been there to kill Lieutenant Flynn.

Then he thought of his neighbor, Mrs. Tenningclaus. The morning of the attacks, he had promised he’d look in on her cats. That had been Sunday. Three days ago. He hoped they hadn’t clawed each other’s eyes out from hunger.