Primary Command. Джек Марс
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nights, I could have easily died. People did. I was getting shot at long before I ever saw Iraq, or Afghanistan, or any of these other classified places I supposedly never went.”
He squinted and shook his head. “I came before a judge when I was seventeen. She told me I could now be tried as an adult. I could see real time in big-boy jail. Or I could get a suspended sentence and join the United States Army. Up to me.”
He smiled. “What else was I gonna do? I joined. I got to basic, drill sergeant there, name of Brooks, immediately had a hard-on for me. Master Sergeant Nathan Brooks. Didn’t like me, and decided he was gonna break me.”
“Did he?” Luke said. He had trouble picturing such a thing, but this wasn’t the first time he had heard something along these lines. “Did he break you?”
Ed laughed. “Oh yeah. He broke me. Then he broke me again. And again. I’ve never been broken so bad in my life. He saw me coming a mile away. Made me his personal project. He said, ‘You think you hard, nigger? You ain’t hard. You ain’t even seen hard yet. But I’m gonna show it to you.’”
“Was he a white guy?” Luke said.
Ed shook his head. “Nah. In those days, if a white man called me nigger, I’d have just killed him. He was a down home brother, from South Carolina someplace. I don’t know. He broke me right in half. And when he was done, he put me back together again, a little better than before. Now I was something other people up the line could at least work with, make something out of.”
He was silent for a moment. The airplane shuddered across a patch of turbulence.
“I never really found the right way to thank that guy.”
Luke shrugged. “Well, it’s not over. Send him some flowers. A Hallmark card. I don’t know.”
Ed smiled, but it was wistful now. “He’s dead. Maybe a year ago. Forty-three years old. He’d already been in the service twenty-five years. He could have retired any time. Apparently, he volunteered for Iraq instead, and they gave it to him. He was on a convoy that got ambushed near Mosul. I don’t know all the details. I saw it in Stars and Stripes. Turns out he was a highly decorated guy. I didn’t know that about him when he was running me into the ground. He never mentioned it.”
He paused. “And I never told him what he meant to me.”
“He probably knew,” Luke said.
“Yeah. He probably did. But I should have said it anyway.”
Luke didn’t disagree.
“Where’s your mom?” he said instead.
Ed shook his head. “Still in Crenshaw. I tried to get her to move out east near me, but she wouldn’t hear of leaving. All her friends are there! So me and my sister chipped in and bought her a little bungalow six blocks away from the old rat hole apartment building where we used to live. A chunk of my pay every month goes to paying the mortgage on that thing. Right in the old neighborhood I used to risk my life trying to get her out of.”
He sighed heavily. “At least there’s food in the fridge and the lights are on. I guess that’s all I care about. She says, ‘Ain’t nobody gonna mess with me. They know you’re my son. And you’re gonna come see ’em if they do.’”
Luke smiled. Ed did too, and this time the smile was more genuine.
“She’s impossible, man.”
Now Luke laughed. After a moment, so did Ed.
“Listen,” Ed said. “I like your plan. I think we can pull it off. A couple more guys, the right ones…” He nodded. “Yeah. It’s doable. I need to catch about forty more winks, and maybe I’ll have a few thoughts of my own, some things to add.”
“Sounds good,” Luke said. “I look forward to that. I’d prefer not to get anybody on our team killed out there.”
“Especially not us,” Ed said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
June 26
6:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time
Special Activities Center, Directorate of Operations
Central Intelligence Agency
Langley, Virginia
“It seems the president has lost his marbles.”
“Oh?” the old man smoking the cigarette said. It sounded like he had marbles in his throat. His teeth were dark yellow. Receding gums made them long. They seemed to click together when he spoke. The effect was horrifying. “Do tell.”
They were deep inside the bowels of headquarters. Most places inside the building, smoking was now off limits. But here in the inner sanctum? Anything was allowed.
“I’m sure you’ve already heard,” Special Agent Wallace Speck said.
He sat across a wide steel desk from the old man. There was almost nothing on the desk. No phone, no computer, not a piece of paper or a pencil. There was only a white ceramic ashtray, filled to overflowing with used cigarette butts.
The old man nodded. “Refresh my memory.”
“Yesterday he suggested that the crew of the Nereus be left to rot in Russian hands. He said this in front of twenty or thirty people.”
“Skip the easy stuff,” the old man said. They were in a room without windows. He took a deep drag on his cigarette, held it, and then let loose a plume of blue smoke. The ceiling was at least fifteen feet above their heads, and the smoke drifted upward toward it.
“Well, he walked that sentiment back. But he’s cut us and our friends out of the rescue operation, in favor of our new little brother at FBI.”
“Skip,” the old man said.
Wallace Speck shook his head. The old man looked like hell. How was he even still alive? He’d been chain smoking cigarettes since before Speck was born. His face was like ancient newsprint, turning almost as yellow as his teeth. His wrinkles had wrinkles. His body had no muscle tone at all. His flesh seemed to hang on bone.
The thought gave Speck a brief flashback to eating at a fancy restaurant one time. “How’s the chicken tonight?” he said to the waiter. “Beautiful,” the waiter said. “It falls right off the bone.”
The old man’s meat was anything but beautiful. But his eyes were still as sharp as razors, as focused as lasers. They were the only things left.
Those eyes regarded Speck. They wanted the dirt. They wanted the parts that people like Wallace Speck worried about sometimes. He could dig up the dirt, and he did. That was his job. But sometimes he wondered if the Special Activities Center of the CIA wasn’t overstepping its mandate. Sometimes he wondered if the special activities didn’t amount to treason.
“The man has trouble sleeping,” Speck said. “It seems he hasn’t gotten over the kidnapping of his daughter. He relies on Ambien to sleep, and he often washes his pill down with a glass of wine, or two. It’s a dangerous habit, for obvious reasons.”
Speck paused. He could give the old man paperwork, but the man didn’t want to look at paper. He just wanted to listen. Speck knew that. “We have audiotape and transcripts of a dozen telephone calls to his family ranch in Texas over the past ten days. The conversations are with his wife. In each call, he expresses his desire to leave the presidency, move back to the ranch, and spend time with his family. During three of those calls, he breaks down crying.”
The old man smiled and took another deep drag on the smoke. His eyes became slits. His tongue darted out. There was a piece of tobacco there at the tip of it. He looked like a lizard. “Good. More.”
“He has a sort of hero worship obsession with Don Morris, our little upstart rival at the FBI Special Response Team.”
The old man made a hand motion like a wheel spinning.
“More.”
Speck