Jack Coughlin - Running the Maze

Which was why Curtis was angry as he stood beside the big office window. In his hands was a handwritten note that had been delivered by a private courier, folded and sealed in two envelopes. His lips had drawn into thin lines when he read it, and the eyes darkened. Failure! The girl still lived!

The undersecretary sighed and fed the note and envelopes edge-on into the office shredder, which cross-chipped the paper into microscopic pieces that would be impossible to ever reassemble. At the end of the day, they would go into the burn bag and be incinerated. During the Iranian revolution that toppled the shah from power back in the 1970s, the U.S. Embassy in Tehran had shredded all of its important documents. Those thousands of strips had been reassembled and pasted back together by Iranian students and today could be read verbatim. The WikiLeaks scandal made security even chancier. William Curtis preferred for his secrets to remain secrets.

There had been no mention of the Quantico action in his morning briefing, which was gratifying. The Marine Corps was keeping it bottled up while its investigators tried to determine exactly how the breach happened and who was involved. Curtis was confident that they never would. The mission that day to which the girl had been assigned was a simple training exercise, and all preparatory communications were handled through normal open channels. The people at Task Force Trident had contacted the Department of Defense with a request for technical support, and DoD went through the Treasury Department to get a particular helicopter and its Coast Guard crew. Orders were cut from departmental operations to base ops and squadron ops, specifying exact times and coordinates. It had all been available in various military mailboxes, easily monitored by outsiders.

Curtis had had a rogue private security company monitoring the system for information ever since the CT/DSS terminated surveillance of Petty Officer Ledford, declaring that she was no threat. That depended, the undersecretary thought, on who, or what, was being threatened. The target wasn’t even in the United States but in Pakistan, where the huge new bridge project was under way, with funding flowing in from the oil fields. Front companies of Curtis Construction, in partnership with similar Muslim businesses, were lost in the organizational maze. He could not afford to have that link exposed.

When Beth Ledford had first begun making inquiries, Curtis managed to blunt her requests and employ State Department resources to track her under the guise of a potential terrorist threat. When the DSS pulled out, he had resorted to his very expensive friends in the private sector who specialized in unusual assignments, professionals that he had used before.

For them, infiltrating the Quantico base had been easy. Distant fences that were bare of infrared sensors or cameras could have been scaled easily, since guards were posted only at the choke points of entrances and exits. That would have made getting away more difficult, however, so two uniformed Marines in a Humvee bearing the proper stickers on the windshield drove up to the gate and merited no more than a wave from the guard who allowed them in. They drove to the landing zone coordinates, where one had taken his long rifle and found a comfortable hide on the side of a hill overlooking the LZ. The driver hid the Humvee nearby and took up position with a reliable Stinger ground-to-air missile. Afterward, they simply drove off the base, right before security was heightened.

It should have worked. Now the message stated the mission had failed, the hundred-thousand-dollar fee was nonrefundable, and the girl had dropped out of sight. The only good news was that his team had acquired the name of the Marine who had been her training escort. A second operation was being assembled to snatch him and squeeze out the information on the whereabouts of prime target Beth Ledford.

SLEEP DID NOT COME easily that night for Kyle Swanson in his apartment near Georgetown University, so after midnight, he went out to walk and think. There were few people around, except those lingering at the doorways of bars and pubs to smoke their cigarettes before going back inside to the beer and laughter. Some were students, but most of them were government workers and young lawyers and lobbyists pawing through the bureaucratic victories and defeats of their day on Capitol Hill like witches divining a purpose from a scattering of bones.

The unexpected catastrophe at the landing zone had left everyone in Trident, including him, also searching for meaning. There were no answers, and General Middleton was pissed, shaking the trees hard. The counterterrorism people at the State Department were equally bewildered and adamant that they had nothing to do with what had happened. For Kyle, how the daring ambush was done was less important than why it was even attempted. What did Beth Ledford have that was so damned important?

He meandered down M Street, heading east. The buildings all around were relatively small by the standards of other major urban areas, because skyscrapers did not exist in Washington. Nothing was taller than the Washington Monument; buildings were instead spread out, or excavated to create space underground. Swanson paused. Just ahead, M terminated as it crossed the Potomac River into Rosslyn on the Virginia side. With the heat of the day finally gone, a slight mist was rising from the water. A well-used pathway led to the boathouses clustered under the Francis Scott Key Bridge, named in honor of the writer of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” He followed it down to the water’s edge, giving plenty of space to a young couple making out in the shadows.

Bridges, he thought. What is going on with bridges? His Nikes padded silently along the board of the dock where the long canoes were stacked and secured. Sailboats. Motorboats. Sculls. Jet Skis. Why wasn’t there a big river going under that big bridge in Pakistan? The mist was thicker on the water.

With his hands in the pockets of his jeans, Kyle turned toward the lights of the city downriver. The upper part of the monument could be seen, with small red lights at the top blinking to warn pilots of its presence, as if the big floodlights that bathed the obelisk at night did not provide enough of a clue. To his right were the elegant lines of the Kennedy Center, and closer was the stack of concrete-and-glass pancakes of the Watergate Complex. He went halfway up the grassy bank, found a dry spot of grass, lay down, and fell asleep just after seeing the faraway sparkle of a falling star.

He heard an oar sluggishly moving against the Potomac water and instantly knew it was not some sculler out for a midnight row. The smell told him so: dried tears, dead flowers, fresh blood. Swanson let out a groan. The Boatman had arrived. He knew the ragged figure emerging from the fog was nothing but a dream, a character that had a habit of showing up in his mind when there was a crisis. Invariably, death followed in his wake.

Hello.

You’re on the wrong river. The Styx is underground somewhere, down in hell. This is the Potomac.

A slender thread of crooked laughter made Kyle look up. Charon was still in his boat, the long oar over the stern bumping ever so lightly against the boardwalk.

We will be doing more business soon. Carry plenty of gold coins to put on their eyes or beneath the tongues, Gunnery Sergeant. I give no free passage from this world.

Swanson looked across the river to the Virginia shoreline, which was being eaten by a churning wall of fire.

I will never pay you to take a man to hell.

But you are the one who sends them there. It is only fair that I be paid if I am to further your work.