Will Staeger - Painkiller

Gates procured a tall coffee from the Starbucks kiosk and returned immediately to his office. On his way through the executive waiting room, he fired an order at Miss Anders without looking at her.

“Get Rhone up here,” he said, then stopped before charging through the door to his office. Miss Anders, he realized, had not reacted to his order with her usual fervor. In fact, she hadn’t reacted at all.

The typically stone-faced assistant was flush with either embarrassment or anger, the color of her face approaching the shade of her candy-apple-red blazer.

“What is it,” Gates said.

“There’s a caller holding.”

She didn’t say anything more.

“Well?” Gates said. “Who?”

“He says his name is ‘Lunar Eclipse.’ He doesn’t seem to accept that I’m not able-”

“Fine.”

“I’ve told him you’re not-”

“I’ll take the damn call, Miss Anders.”

For Gates it hadn’t been the worst day of his life, but it sure as hell wasn’t his best.

During his third year in the Directorate of Operations, he’d been trying to install a leader his staff had told him would be the right man for a certain Central American nation. The problem was that there was no election in that particular nation for another four years, and the nation’s current prime minister, who had no interest in America’s views, was in perfect health. For Gates the solution was simple: remove the misguided leader and install the correct one in his place.

It was a complicated operation, but in Gates’s view he orchestrated it brilliantly, even in failure. At least this was what he had come to believe once he’d consumed the gushing round of compliments fed him by his men’s club comrades after the fact.

In one of the few successful covert CIA assassinations in history, his team had succeeded in taking out the errant leader, doing it, in fact, under the cover of night at the very palace where he slept. Unfortunately, Gates had overlooked the leader’s very powerful minister of defense who, upon getting wind of the assassination attempt, allowed the American agents to waltz into the leader’s palace and take him out with no resistance whatsoever. The only resistance that occurred came after the minister of defense confirmed the prime minister was muerto, at which point he sealed the palace perimeter and captured or killed the entire American team.

Rather than leave anything to chance or election returns, the minister of defense decried this terrible tragedy, declared himself prime minister for the length of the former leader’s term, and promptly imprisoned the opposition leader and all the top members of his party. The opposition leader, of course, was Gates’s man.

Gates quickly moved to reduce CIA’s presence in the region and bagged any further plans to install a new leader, switching instead to a grassroots strategy of antigovernment propaganda. He had cargo planes dump leaflets on the country’s bigger cities, blasted the regional airwaves with powerful radio broadcasts, and coordinated with anyone willing to participate in a domestic disinformation campaign documenting whatever fictional atrocities he felt were appropriate to sully the reputation of the former minister of defense.

Encouraged by his men’s club comrades to do so, Gates shelved his concerns for the twelve-man team he’d sent down to engineer the coup. They were an extreme liability, especially as Gates had undertaken the operation on his own initiative, but in time he felt safe concluding that all twelve had died. A month after the botched raid, Gates had notified the media that a DC-3, sent on a relief mission to Zimbabwe, had crashed in a treacherous African mountain range, killing all twelve passengers. The names on the manifest mysteriously matched those Gates had sent to assassinate the Central American prime minister.

Gates was promoted shortly thereafter to deputy director of operations.

That put him at sixteen years ago, coming out of Cleo’s on a Thursday afternoon, having just finished a lunch with a particularly well-connected undersecretary of state.

Gates hadn’t met anyone on the team he’d sent to Central America, so there wasn’t any reason for him to recognize the tall, deeply tanned man who bumped him while Gates was making for his car outside the club. The man apologized, then followed him the block and a half to his car, Gates driving a big Buick that year.

That’s when the man, back then, said, “So you’re Gates.”

The man had short black hair. He wore a suit and overcoat. Despite the wardrobe selection, he failed to come off as one of the men’s club set.

Gates recognized him as the same man who had bumped into him outside of Cleo’s. He felt a surge of fear, wondering whether he should duck into the driver’s seat and speed off while he still had the Buick between them.

“Well, yes,” he replied.

“We should talk,” the man said.

The stranger had a baritone voice and cold, vacant eyes. Gates pulled himself together, thinking the guy could be a reporter-that he should be careful what he said, or admitted.

“What about?” he said. “What do you want to talk about?”

The stranger jerked his head, said, “Over here,” and walked off past the hood of the Buick and across the street to Dupont Circle, a brief expanse of green packed with concrete benches and a fountain. He waited for Gates to make up his mind. This took about ninety seconds, the stranger just standing at the edge of the park, appearing more interested in the circle’s pivotal fountain than in Gates’s decision-making process.

Gates dodged a car or two and brought himself even with the stranger as the man strolled along the trail encircling the fountain. After about a quarter-loop on the path, Gates felt compelled to speak.

“Why might I want to talk?”

The stranger looked at him. “I didn’t say you’d want to,” he said, “only that we should.”

They strolled on, the stranger quiet for another quarter-loop. “I’m officially dead,” he said eventually, as casually as though he were discussing the flora. “But it should be obvious to you that I am alive.”

Gates wasn’t firing on all cylinders. He said, “Right.”

“‘Eclipse,’” the stranger said.

Jesus! Gates nearly jumped out of his skin.

How could he-Christ, how could any man have made it, and why hadn’t he heard from him before now?

Eclipse.

It was the term he had used as the internal memo coding for the flubbed Central American assassination effort: Operation Eclipse.

Gates realized he had clammed up and, in order to say something, said, “You’re being somewhat vague,” and was already thinking about how much it was going to cost him to keep this son of a bitch quiet when the stranger spoke again.

“Don’t bullshit me.” They were halfway around their second loop of the park. “But don’t panic, either.”

Gates looked ahead, behind, to the side, seeing no one but the usual derelicts loitering in defiance of the city ordinance, draped across the benches like they owned the place. There were no members of Cleo’s to come to the rescue, so Gates continued walking.

“Why shouldn’t I?” he said.

“Because,” the stranger said, “I’ve got a solution.”

“Oh?”

“What we’ll do,” the stranger said, “is find a nice posting somewhere. I’m seeing a small place-lots of sun, some sand, water, not much going on, maybe some fishing to pass the day. There’s a spot I’m thinking of that might just work. They call them the British Virgin Islands-the BVIs. Why not? Then let’s tenure me. You can finance it out of, oh, I don’t know, pick a fund. Call me a GS-14 and pay me that plus hazard pay. Any GS-14 in the British Virgins is likely to be chief of station, so let’s go ahead and assign me that title too. This sound all right so far?”