Andrew Britton - The Operative

The revelation about his daughter pinched. No suffering was greater than to see one’s child dead or dying or incapacitated. He had witnessed his own daughter in anguish. As a young girl, Kate had become increasingly withdrawn. The “highs” of childhood were smothered by her frequent tetchiness and insoluble feelings of hopelessness. She would lash out over insignificant, everyday actions, at least Trask thought they were, like the occasional grinding of her mother’s teeth during dinner or if she didn’t get an immediate response to a question. And Kate would somehow manage to sustain that seductive anger throughout the next few weeks, and sometimes into months.

At first, Trask assumed it was just his lack of experience in nurturing a little girl’s spirit, that perhaps as with his father, his stern comportment was better suited for rearing a boy. But as Kate developed and further removed herself from family, then friends, Trask noticed her issues begin to physically manifest themselves. She no longer had oomph throughout the day, and at night she had trouble sleeping, developing horrible, dark circles under her striking green eyes from staring through her angst all night. She would weep for hours and became increasingly paranoid that she was being analyzed and dissected by her parents. She stopped eating breakfast, then dinner, and lost alarming amounts of weight, when a girl her age should have begun blossoming. Trask and Eugenie could no longer ignore their daughter’s problems, nor could they continue to be argued away. Trask needed to be a concerned father and salvage his fragile daughter’s livelihood, to save her life

After many visits to the hospital for nutrient-infused intravenous therapy, among other recovery procedures, several doctors eventually concluded that she had an extreme case of hypomania: she was bipolar. Although relieved her condition wasn’t something terminal, but rather treatable, Trask couldn’t help but blame himself for her circumstances. Highs and lows were a fact of life he was familiar with, but he’d always had the tools to deal with those burdens, namely, projects and desires that kept him distracted from real life. Goals that kept his mind targeted on the bigger picture.

After many miserable months of trying to maintain Kate’s temperament through heavy medicating, and after her almost successful suicide attempt by overdosing on her pills, Trask was loosely referred by a friend to the radical Dr. Ayesha Gillani, who was curing patients with hypnotherapy, connecting new passageways through the tunnels in their conflicted minds, straightening the lines of their internal communication by gradually guiding them through a seemingly self-actuated choose-your-own-adventure-type scenario. Trask had his doubts, but he also had his hopes.

Dr. Gillani wasn’t too far removed from her Universitat Heidelberg postgrad education at the time, a young woman in her early thirties whose light complexion, steel-blue eyes, and short dark hair, mixed with a spicy, almost cinnamon aroma, compounded her image into someone who could be trusted. She dressed professionally, wore very little makeup, no earrings or jewelry, apart from a classic Chanel watch. Simple and well manicured. And after only a few intricate sessions with Dr. Gillani, Kate’s psychologically charged disposition had been virtually rewired. She had been cured. In his daughter’s eyes, at least, Trask was now a hero.

But Trask had caused misery in the sons and daughters of others. Even the most hardened tribal warlord, refusing to become an informant, would change his mind when his young daughter was forced to watch her pet goat being skinned alive. Trask had studied the videotape that had been made of that little girl’s face. There was the key to world peace. There was the inspiration for this undertaking. Not her agony, but the agony of the mothers and fathers of September 11, of the USS Cole, of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where IEDs were used against good-hearted soldiers who were only trying to help packs of ignorant, thankless savages and their equally corrupt spawn.

“Mr. Trask?”

“I’m here,” he said. “The loss of his daughter would suggest, Agent, that Mr. Bishop will be preoccupied.”

“Not this man, sir,” the voice assured him. “Not Reed Bishop. I had my eye on him before this. His wife died when he was in Mumbai, investigating an agent’s death. He stayed with the case, and the funeral had to be postponed.”

“Did he solve that case?”

“He did.”

“Then you’d better be very, very careful,” Trask warned.

“Of course, sir. The Yasmin angle will only strengthen our hand.”

“All right,” Trask said. “We’ll talk later.”

“Good afternoon, sir.”

Trask hung up. The world around him was silent, conducive to reflection. It was a dangerous tactic they had embraced in the run-up to the mission, but Trask enjoyed the feeling it gave him. He hadn’t had that sense of risk for a very long time. He looked at his desk, at the photos of his own family. His wife, Eugenie, whom he adored, and their daughter, Kate. He didn’t know if he respected Bishop for that or found him despicable.

Not that it mattered. What was most important now was the corridor outside his study door. The men who had risked so much. The names to which he hoped one day, in all humility, to add one more.

His own.

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

Reed Bishop was cold when he woke.

Cold and very hard of hearing.

His right cheek was on the cool cherrywood floor, his lips were dry, and his lungs were rasping. His body was… naked, it felt like. His arms, legs, and back felt exposed.

And there was stuffing in his left ear. He moved his hand left, thinking to pull whatever was in there out, saw a cloud drift over.

What the hell? he thought.

Where was he? More importantly, where was his daughter? They had just been looking at someone, an older woman and her husband, talking to them…

“Laura?” he said, though he wasn’t convinced he had spoken. It sounded more like a thought.

Still thinking of his daughter, he placed his palms against the floor, pushed, and was suddenly surrounded by a cloud.

Did I do that? How?

He raised his head, looked through the haze, didn’t see Laura to his left, didn’t see much of anything that looked familiar, only a jumble of debris. His neck went numb, and he let gravity pull his face down with a hard slap so he was staring across the floor again. With effort, he turned slowly to the right.

There was Laura, he thought with relief.

It looked as though she was sleeping. But she was white, covered with what looked like confectioners’ sugar. And…

What?

There was only half of her. The top half. He screamed. This time he was sure, because it punched through the thickness in his ears and caused his throat to shake and cleared his head so he could hear the sobs and wails of others. As the dust thinned, he saw them, and more debris, and bodies and parts of bodies and a glaze of blood across everything, which ridiculously reminded him of raspberry drizzle, except for the blood that had pooled around Laura, where her legs used to be…

That was the last thing Bishop remembered until he was sitting in a metal chair in some other room, being examined by a medic.

He was no longer so cold. And he could hear.

“Mr. Bishop, do you have any pain?”

Bishop turned tear-blurred eyes toward the speaker. It was a young woman. She was wearing a look of grave concern. He wondered how she knew his name, until he saw her eyes looking at his chest and he remembered the name tag. He looked down. It hung incongruously from a piece of lapel on the remnants of the dinner jacket he still had on. An FBI-issue terry-cloth wrap had been thrown around his shoulders.