Andrew Britton - The Operative

The drivers were actually saner here than they were in Atlanta. He looked forward to being away from all that. They were headed west now, to New Mexico. Neither he nor Bell had been told why. Presumably to pick something up, since the van was empty. It didn’t matter to him. They had a couple thousand miles of open road, his iPod was loaded with Dixieland jazz, and a generous expense account had been allotted for food and lodging. Because the van was empty, they wouldn’t actually have to sleep in it, as they did on many trips.

Scroggins was still reflecting on the things he’d just seen, on how cooperative and accommodating the police had been. Not so much that Chuck Lancaster, but he was young. He wouldn’t have remembered. A lot of people said that it was 2001 that changed New Yorkers, made them more aware of their surroundings but also of their neighbors. Maybe that was true, the same way that his father said World War II brought everyone together.

“Especially when they realized that Coloreds could fight for our country as well as everyone else,” Pop had said.

John Scroggins found it sad that brotherhood should come at such a price. Though it was a good thing to have, he mouthed a little prayer that nothing like those tragedies happened again.

Chuck Lancaster did not go immediately to the penthouse. He went to the parking garage, where he loaded one of the crates in the trunk of a beaten-up 2005 BMW. There was a rusted dolly already in the trunk. He had to shuffle the latter around to make room. It was not a car anyone was likely to steal. Even if they wanted to, the spark plugs had been removed. They were upstairs and would be restored at the proper time.

As soon as the crate was loaded, the man went back to the elevator and took the other crate to the penthouse. He was still thinking about his thumbprint and understood why the doc had made sure he did not have a criminal record before hiring him. She wouldn’t want an ex-con signing for equipment being used for experiments in mind control.

Not that an ex-con would know what to do with that equipment, the big man thought. He was an undergraduate psych student at Columbia. He had been working with Dr. Gillani for three months, watching her and Dr. Samson with intense interest, and he still didn’t know what to do with it.

But he was learning. That was why he worked here. He hoped he would be able to continue when the semester started again. Dr. Gillani had said the crate he had just off-loaded was going to a new facility up the river. If it wasn’t too far out of town, he would still be able to commute from the university.

That was still months away, though. No need to worry about it now. He was eager to get back and see how Princess Yasmin fared in the next phase of her evolution.

Dr. Gillani called Alex Hunt to let him know that the packages had arrived. She asked again what they were.

“Need to know,” he told her again.

The agent had been asleep in his Hell’s Kitchen apartment, exhausted by the previous day’s events and the long night of answering questions from the police and his own people. The police seemed satisfied that he had left Franklin May standing on a street corner and had gone right back to Dr. Gillani’s lab. He couldn’t tell what his own boss thought. The assistant director in charge, Samantha Lennon had been pulled from a squash tournament to deal with the situation. She had always been suspicious of Hunt because he did not seem to be after her job. Paranoia was a funny thing. The truth was, he liked having all access to information and resources without the responsibility of running the field office.

Hunt showered and grabbed a coffee at the corner of Forty-Fifth and Eighth Avenue before heading to the subway. He took the One train downtown, emerging at Rector Street and walking to the lab.

He felt almost guilty about how easily the packages had got into Manhattan. The Trask name, an oblivious and innocent driver, cargo bound for the NYPD. It guaranteed there would be sharp scrutiny of the handiest packages, and an assumption that the rest were more of the same. Why wouldn’t they be?

Hunt crossed the narrow footbridge and passed the site where he had left Franklin May. The area was still marked off with yellow police tape, and an officer was standing guard. Employees were entering the building, some clearly unaware of what had happened right outside their door.

Hunt didn’t smile. He didn’t feel anything. He had done what had to be done.

And in two days, after nearly two years of groundwork, after a nearly flawless execution in Baltimore, he would finally finish the job.

So the larger mission could begin.

Kealey could have slept for a month. He woke with the alarm, moving to the bathroom before he was really awake, giving himself the luxury of a few seconds to remember why he was up and what he was supposed to be doing. At least he knew his way around the bedroom in the dark. Kealey had slept in so many beds over the years that that in itself was a small, happy miracle.

In fact, he thought as he snapped on the bathroom light, the time he’d spent in this rented house might be the longest he’d stayed put since he was a kid.

Rented house, he thought. Not a rented home. His life had not wanted for excitement, for travel-often to places most people had never heard of-and even for romance. But home was something that had eluded him. The desk jockeys, the informants, even the politicians he had known all seemed to envy him his freedom. CIA field guys listened a lot more than they divulged, and Kealey wasn’t a talker to begin with. So he never told them, told anyone except Allison, how much he missed having anything approaching roots.

“Your stability is all self-generated,” she had told him in one of their recent therapy sessions.

She was right. But what he told her, half joking, was also true: “Boy howdy,” he’d said, “bootstrapping does wear you down.”

Hot water was waiting for Kealey after his shower and shave. He had smelled nothing brewing and swore when he saw it. He had set the Krups timer the night before but had forgotten to put coffee in the filter. So he had Lipton to go. It failed to satisfy, but Kealey got the caffeine kick start he needed. He grabbed the ticket he’d printed out and the overnight bag he’d also packed the previous night. He hoped he hadn’t forgotten to put anything important in it. Like his Glock, hidden in a leather toiletries bag. That was the real reason he preferred to travel by train. It was the only mode of public transportation that was relatively unchanged since it was invented: schedules were an approximation and security was nonexistent. There were no bag checks, and the gun stayed with him.

The drive to Union Station took a little longer than he’d expected, with checkpoints and roadblocks still in effect. It would be that way for at least a week, until Homeland Security had determined there were no in-motion or pending threats against the nation’s capital. Kealey wasn’t surprised to see them, to have to show his license and registration to beat cops; he’d simply forgotten.

Sometimes you get so deep into something, you forget what it does to the real world, he thought as he finally reached the station.

Long-term parking was at 50 Massachusetts Avenue, NE. It cost twenty dollars a day and wasn’t really worth it. But since Andrews was paying, Kealey indulged. The station’s beautifully refurbished lobby was cavernously empty. Anyone who was getting out of the city had done so the night before; anyone who was already out wasn’t coming back.

Kealey checked the arrival/departure board, noted his track, and went to it. The IA man he was traveling with was already there, waiting at the open gate. He was dressed in a black raincoat and a dusty, badly rumpled suit. Kealey had never met Reed Bishop, but he knew him at a glance.