Mission Liberty (37 page)

DeLuca returned to Washington. He was summoned to the Pentagon, where he was read the riot act, loudly and at length, for
overstepping his authority and allowing, once again, his mission to expand beyond its original parameters. General LeDoux
was at the meeting and took DeLuca’s side, but the heat was intense. At the end of the dressing down, DeLuca was told he and
Team Red were suspended from duty, pending further review, and that a letter of reprimand would be added to his file. They
asked him to write up a full report, and he said he would, though he knew no one would read it. LeDoux assured him, after
the meeting, that the suspension was only temporary, and that the letter of reprimand would be revoked, and that the bureaucrats
were only covering their asses, in case someone from above, or someone from the media, got wind of what had happened.

“I know,” DeLuca said. “I may be extraordinarily youthful in appearance, but I wasn’t born yesterday. Frankly, I don’t give
a shit, as long as I can still do my job.”

“You can,” LeDoux said. “I’ll make sure of it. I’m going to take some heat myself for this, but I think I can square it. Can
I ask you one question?”

“Sure,” DeLuca said.

“This goes no further than us,” LeDoux said. “Did you suggest that Paul Asabo put on the robe and then open the gate, or was
it his idea to assume power?”

“Come on, Phil,” DeLuca said. “You know I’m not smart enough to do something like that. I’m not even a commissioned officer.”

“Stay by your phone,” LeDoux said. “By the way, do you remember how I went through channels with your request to rescue the
ambassador by posing as a car bomber?”

“Yeah?”

“I finally heard back from command,” LeDoux said.

“And?”

“Request denied,” LeDoux said. “Too high risk.”

“Shit,” DeLuca said. “I guess we’ll just have to think of something else.”

“Don’t worry, though—you still have friends in high places. Matter of fact, the White House thinks very highly of you. Apparently
there’s talk of giving you some kind of medal for rescuing Reverend Andrew Rowen.”

“Rescuing Rowen?” DeLuca said in disbelief. “I pointed to a bus.”

“Yes,” LeDoux said. “Promptly and with great accuracy. And for that, the president is extremely grateful.”

“Can I go now?”

“Yes, you can,” LeDoux said.

David DeBatto
has served in the active-duty Army, Army Reserve, and Army National Guard as a German linguist, counterintelligence course
instructor, and counterintelligence special agent. He served in Europe at the height of the Cold War in the late 1970s to
early 1980s and in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 where his Tactical Human Intelligence Team (THT) hunted Saddam,
WMD, and top Ba’ath party leaders. He is currently writing further books in this series for Warner Books along with Pete Nelson
as well as articles for major publications such as
Vanity Fair, Salon,
and
The American Prospect.
He is also a frequent guest on major television and radio news programs giving his analysis of breaking stories in the global
war on terrorism. David lives in Florida.

Pete Nelson
lives with his wife and son in western Massachusetts. He got his MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1979
and has written both fiction and nonfiction for magazines, including
Harper’s, Playboy, Esquire, MS, Outside, The Iowa Review, National Wildlife, Glamour,
and
Redbook.
He was a columnist for
Mademoiselle
and a staff writer for
LIVE
magazine, covering various live events including horse pulls, music festivals, dog shows, accordion camps, and arm-wrestling
championships. He’s published twelve young adult novels, including a six-book series about a girl named Sylvia Smith-Smith,
which earned him an Edgar Award nomination from the Mystery Writers of America. His young adult nonfiction WWII history,
Left for Dead
(Random House, 2002), about the sinking of the USS
Indianapolis,
won the 2003 Christopher Award and was selected for the American Library Association’s 2003 top ten list. His other nonfiction
titles include
Real Man Tells All
(Viking, 1988),
Marry Like a Man
(NAL, 1992),
That Others May Live
(Crown, 2000), and
Kidshape
(Rutledge Hill, 2004). His novel
The Christmas List
was published by Rutledge Hill Press in 2004.

More Explosive CI Action!

Please turn this page for a preview of David DeBatto and Pete Nelson’s new novel

CI: Homeland Threat

available soon from Warner Books.

D
ELUCA WAS ABLE TO GRAB THE RINGING TELEPHONE
at his bedside before it woke his wife. He slept more lightly than she did, a habit he’d picked up in Iraq, if not before
then. He glanced at the clock on his bed stand. It was twenty minutes after five. Nobody calling at that hour would be calling
with good news.

“DeLuca,” he said.

“Good morning,” the voice said. “Captain Martin with General LeDoux’s office.”

DeLuca had spoken with Martin a hundred times before, but Martin was the sort of guy who needed to give himself a full introduction
each time he called, a formal military sort who followed the book at all times, but an okay guy.

“What can I do for you, Captain?” DeLuca said. He took the mobile handset into his study. The sky was becoming light in the
east, overcast after a night of rain, the air coming through the window screen fresh and damp and full of ozone. Glancing
out the window, he saw a pair of deer, sniffing at the tulips his wife had planted in the garden. He’d made a slurry from
raw eggs and painted the flowers, upon the advice of his friend Walter, who knew about such things. The slurry was working—the
deer turned away. Some people thought they were cute. He thought of them more like rats on steroids.

“Bad news, I’m afraid,” Martin said. “There’s been some activity. All in the last twelve hours or so.”

“What kind of activity?” he said. “Where?”

“Minnesota, South Carolina, Florida and England,” Martin said. “Three retired generals and an admiral have been attacked.
And possibly something in your neighborhood. I can’t really give you a full briefing, right at this moment. We’re still gathering
intel, but we only now got word. General LeDoux wanted to schedule something for later in the day, but it looks like some
of our retired stars are being targeted. And/or their families.”

“In my neighborhood?” he asked. “In Boston?”

“We’re not sure,” Martin said. “We’ve gotten news there’s been a homicide. No details yet. We were hoping you could look into
it.”

“A homicide?” he said. “Why are you calling me?”

“It’s military,” Martin said.

“The M.P.s handle crimes by military personnel.”

“We don’t know the killers,” Martin said, “but it appears to be a terrorist attack on U.S. soil against a military target.
Global coordination has been suggested. The Pentagon wants to get CI involved. They’re still discussing to what extent, but
they want you to scramble, I’m afraid.”

“Okay,” DeLuca said. “Who and where?”

“Boston Common parking garage,” Captain Martin said. “It’s Katie Quinn. General Joe Quinn’s daughter. We can tell you more
at the briefing but right now, we’d like to get you on the scene ASAP. We just picked it up a little while ago, so it’s pretty
fresh.”

“I’m about twenty minutes away,” DeLuca said.

“We’ll talk to you after you’ve had a look,” Martin said. “We sent a car to General Quinn’s house too. We might want you there
as well, but we’ll let you know. First things first. Sorry to have to wake you.”

“It’s all right,” DeLuca said. “I had to answer the phone anyway.”

DeLuca grabbed an armful of clothes, dressed quietly in the downstairs bathroom and left his wife a note on the kitchen table
to tell her something had come up and to call him on his cell.

He found his Bs and Cs in the drawer of his desk where he kept them, then took his service Beretta from underneath his mattress
and donned his shoulder holster, the weapon concealed beneath his jacket. A familiar feeling came over him. In the fifteen
years between getting out of the Army the first time and re-enlisting after 9/11, he’d served with the Boston Police Department.
He knew the drill, too well.

He was on the road minutes after hanging up the phone, on a steamy summer morning where the humidity and the temperature were
both already in the low eighties. Traffic at that hour was light. He took the Northeast Expressway over the Mystic River Bridge
and then 93 south into “The Big Dig,” the massive reconstruction effort that, over the past fifteen years, had successfully
taken interstate 93 and sunk it into the ground, the expressway now a tunnel beneath downtown Boston costing the city a mere
$14 billion, which was only $12 billion more than they originally thought it would cost. He emerged at the Summer street exit
and took it to Tremont, circling The Common once to see where a squad car blocked the garage entrance on Charles street, and
parked finally on Boylston at a meter, walking across the park to a kiosk where an elevator and a stairway led down into the
garage.

He’d walked the Boston Common a thousand times as a detective. The rain had stopped, but the sidewalks were still puddled.
He recognized a homeless guy he’d known only as Marvin the Moon Man, who liked to sleep in the cemetery and who was, at this
early hour, sitting on a bench in a thorazine haze, talking to himself. In another hour or two, Crazy Larry would be playing
the bongos by the baseball fields. There were probably already Emerson College students, smoking pot in the Public Gardens.
DeLuca noted the irony—the last time he’d visited the Boston Common had been to attend a political rally for retired U.S.
Army General Joseph Quinn, who’d been running for president. General Quinn had spoken of how he’d come from Boston originally,
traveled the world to serve his country and come home to Back Bay, and how he would nevertheless be willing, if called upon,
to move to the White House to serve his country again. DeLuca had known General Quinn since Gulf One. He’d always liked and
respected the General, for how he’d carried himself in Desert Storm, for the way he’d led the coalition of forces in Kosovo,
and for how he’d always respected and stood up for the common soldier. DeLuca would have voted for him in a heartbeat, had
General Quinn won his party’s nomination, but he hadn’t. Now, if Captain Martin’s information was correct, the body of the
General’s daughter lay dead in the garage below.

H
e found the crime scene on level two, in the northwest corner of the garage, four squad cars with their flashers flashing,
a forensics van and a number of unmarkeds. At this hour on a Saturday morning, the garage was nearly empty. A uniformed officer
stopped him as he approached and told him no one was allowed to get any closer. DeLuca showed the officer his Badge and Credentials
and asked him who was in charge. The uniform told him Lieutenant Morrissey was in charge but that Captain Wexler was there
too.

“The Army is involved in this?” the cop asked.

“You got it. You said Billy Morrissey?” DeLuca said. “I thought he’d be up in New Hampshire ridding the rivers of unwanted
trout by now.”

“No sir,” the uniformed officer said. “He’s still with us.”

Morrissey was talking to a junior officer. DeLuca approached and waited for Morrissey to look up. He smiled when he did.

“Hey Billy,” DeLuca said, shaking the hand of his old friend. “Thought you did your twenty.”

“Hello Lieutenant,” Morrissey said. “Long time no see. Or what was it when you were in the Army? Sergeant?”

“I’m still in,” DeLuca said. “Promoted to Chief Warrant Officer, if you gotta know. Who else is still around besides you?”

“Couple guys,” Morrissey said. “Me, Doyle, Finn, Kaz Takata, Difranco, Lapinski, a couple others. And Wexler, of course.”

He nodded toward the man standing by the garage tollbooth.

“Why’s Wexler here?”

“I don’t know,” Morrissey said. “Scoring points. I’m just trying to stay out of his way. Maybe he was in the area.”

“At five
A.M.
? He still an asshole?”

“Did the Sox win the Series?” Morrissey said. “Yeah, he’s still an asshole.”

“You know what I heard about how the Sox won the World Series? Their lucky charm?” DeLuca asked his friend.

“What?”

“They had Ted Williams’ head in the cooler,” DeLuca said. “Keeping the Gatorade cold.”

“I bet it was smiling too,” Morrissey said. “You here on Army business?”

“I’m afraid so,” DeLuca said. “Counterintelligence.”

“What the fuck’s that mean?” Morrissey asked. “You’re against intelligence?”

“Don’t make me sound like Frank,” DeLuca said. “CI is sort of the Army version of the FBI. Except with more toys. Something
goes wrong inside the Army, we look into it.”

“Like internal affairs?”

“Not exactly, but sort of,” DeLuca said. “We’re also who they send into the fifth world to find the guy who knows the guy
who knows the guy who’s causing problems. Sort of like working a drug gang from the street up. Except with bombs. Katie Quinn?”

“Behind the car,” Morrissey said. “I didn’t think the Army got involved in civilian matters.”

“We do since 9/11,” DeLuca said. “The Patriot Act gives us a bit more leeway. To be honest, they haven’t told me yet why I’m
here. There’s apparently some question as to how civilian this is. I think they also wanted me because I know the father.”

“General Joe?” Morrissey said, walking slowly.

“I worked his security detail, Gulf One,” DeLuca said, walking with him.

“Yeah?”

“They knew he wasn’t going to sit behind a desk at HQ when the ground game got going. He was out there in the dirt with everybody
else, but they wanted me to make sure he didn’t fall into the wrong hands.”

“You like him?”

“Yeah, I liked him.”