No Fortunate Son (2 page)

The Prize

T
he car windows began to steam, Kylie feeling the man’s hands fumbling inexpertly at her bra, half of her brain begging him to figure it out while the other half focused on his belt. She felt the strap on her back release and had a split second of regret, wondering if she should stop the train of hormones raging in the cloistered confines. Get back to just talking, like she’d promised herself would happen.

She thought of what her Scottish roommate had told her just before she’d left, after she’d emphatically stated yet again that she wasn’t seeing anyone. An impish grin on her face, the roommate had said, “I know what you Americans call this. When I did my student exchange to Virginia, it was all about ‘what happens on an exchange stays on the exchange.’”

And now she was in the backseat of a car, not with a British aristocrat, but an American soldier. Someone she’d been trying hard not to like, but had been failing. Her mother would lose her mind if she knew she was seeing someone in the military, which is why she’d been so secretive—even in a foreign country.

But maybe that was part of the attraction.

He parted her shirt and leaned forward, using his mouth, causing an involuntary gasp. She forgot about his belt and arched her back, wrapping her hands in his hair with her eyes closed.

She heard metal hammer the window behind her and felt an explosion of glass rain down. Her date jerked upright, shouting something unintelligible, and then it was a tangle of confusion, men all over her, dragging her out of the car.

She heard, “What the fuck is this? He was supposed to be alone.”

Irish.

Her date began to fight like a wild thing until he was cuffed in the head with the barrel of a pistol. He shouted and rolled onto the ground, holding his skull. He was hoisted to his knees and shown the gun.

He said, “What do you want? Money? The car? Take it.”

The man jammed the barrel into his mouth, the tear on his scalp from the earlier blow leaking blood down his cheek. The man twisted the barrel until the front sight grated against the teeth, saying, “Shut. Up.”

The one holding her said, “What do we do now? Kill her?”

She tried to cover her naked breasts, and the man jerked her arms to the rear, saying, “Don’t move.”

The first man removed the pistol from her date’s mouth and walked to her, a slow, measured pace.

Her date said, “Don’t fucking touch her. I mean it.”

The man smiled and cupped her breast, bouncing it slightly. She felt the tears form and began to tremble. She heard him say, “Why? Is she special?”

Her date remained silent, and the man laughed. He said, “Sterilize the area and leave the Morocco receipt. Don’t make it obvious. Make them find it.”

The man holding her said, “And the girl?”

“Pack her up. We can’t have a body found around here.”

Which was a mistake. Had he left her broken corpse on the deserted English road, he might have lived to see another birthday. Unlike her date, she had no value to be traded, no pedigree that could leverage powerful political forces, but she was special to some.

Very special.

*   *   *

I stomped inside, freezing from the run and grouchy that Jennifer had forced me to do it. I hated cold weather, and for some reason Charleston had turned into the arctic the last two winters. As far as I was concerned, jogging in anything below fifty degrees was flat-out stupid
and exactly why treadmills were invented, but Jennifer hated running in place. Even when the temperature was close to freezing.

Global warming my ass.

Last night, she’d asked if I wanted to run the Ravenel Bridge, and after secretly checking the weather, I’d said yes. Of course, that damn prediction had been wrong. When I’d stepped out onto our balcony this morning, I’d immediately tried to change her mind. She’d shamed me, and we’d taken off, running up East Bay toward the bridge spanning the Cooper River, the cold making me more pissed off the farther I went. We’d crossed and headed back, the steep uphill climb whipped by a bone-chilling wind coming from the lack of protection and the height. I’d stepped it out at that point, leaving her behind, my pace fueled by my aggravation and absolute desire to get out of the cold.

I kicked the door closed, knowing Jennifer wasn’t far behind me and that she’d be peeved about me deserting her. I was pretty sure she could have hung with me, but it would have been hard. And she had no time for mental games anyway.

I moved into the kitchen of our little apartment, the top floor of an antique row house just off East Bay. It was old and sometimes cranky about things like hot water, but the kitchen had been renovated and the location was perfect. All in all, one of the reasons I loved the Holy City.

I put on a pot of coffee and began making Jennifer’s favorite healthy goop of berries, granola, and Greek yogurt, moving into the required apology mode. Our cat came out from underneath the table and hissed at me. I was thinking about kicking the shit out of him when the door opened. Jennifer saw me glaring down and said, “Don’t you dare!”

Caught in the act, I just stuttered, trying to pretend I had been contemplating something else besides squashing the beast’s skeevy head.

Saying he was “our” cat was giving a little too much credit. Jennifer had rescued him from a garbage can outside of our place, and he showed her every bit of love in his vicious little soul in return. He hated me, and believe me, the feeling was mutual.

He was a skinny calico with a potbelly and bald patches from some unknown disease. I couldn’t count the number of times he’d jumped on me when I was sound asleep, tearing his claws into my back.

He twitched his tail in disdain and trotted over to her, rubbing up against her legs and purring. She picked him up with one arm, cooing in a faux baby voice directed at me. “Was Pike mean to my little Knuckles? Hmmm?” The cat looked at me, and I swear he was smiling.

One day, you little shit.

The only good thing about him was his name. Jennifer had decided to anoint him with the callsign of my best friend as a little punishment. Knuckles had given her the callsign Koko on a mission—as in the talking gorilla—and it was something she despised but couldn’t shake. Everyone on our team perpetuated the name no matter what she did. Calling the rat with claws “Knuckles” was her version of payback, although it fell a little short because the satanic beast treated his human namesake just like he treated Jennifer. Apparently, I was the only one worthy of his ire.

Jennifer dropped him to the floor, and he sauntered away, now supreme in his kingdom with the queen preventing any harm. She looked at me, and I prepared to start my defense, but I saw no anger. Before I could begin my groveling she held up a letter in her hand.

“We got something from Blaisdell Consulting.”

Which was really odd. All the transactions for our company ran through Blaisdell for pay purposes—an umbrella cover company for the counterterrorist unit that employed us—but electronic transmissions were the order of the day. Snail mail was some old-school stuff we didn’t do.

She said, “Well, you want to open it, or you want me to?”

Feeling a little flow of adrenaline, I sat down, saying, “Go ahead. Must be pretty important.” Which meant it must be a mission outside the usual scope. Something even crazier than what we habitually did. A little high adventure that had the potential to be a lot of fun.

She slit it open, and I saw her eyes scrunch up. She looked at me in confusion. I said, “Well? Where do they need the expert services of Grolier Recovery? Bali? Phuket?”

She said, “We’ve been fired.”

S
ince I’d been expecting to hear about a mission-impossible tasking, the words made no sense. I stood up so fast the chair I was in fell over.

She said, “It’s a letter saying they no longer need our services.”

I took it and saw professional letterhead, wondering what intelligence egghead had created it. I read
Dear sir, While we hold your services in the utmost regard, we won’t be requiring your assistance in the foreseeable future. . . .

The rest was a bunch of legalese BS about settling accounts and turning in any outstanding equipment. It was signed
Kurt Hale, President
.

What the hell?

Jennifer said, “They can’t
fire
us. We aren’t even in the government.”

I said nothing, only staring at the official piece of paper that would destroy my life. I knew I’d gone a little overboard on our last mission, but it had turned out pretty damn good. In fact, better than good. If I hadn’t gone off the reservation, tens of thousands of people would have died. Knuckles had warned me of the repercussions, but I never thought it would come to pass. I mean, surely results mattered.
Didn’t they?

She said, “Pike?”

Brought out of my reverie, I said, “I don’t know, but Knuckles will.”

I knew he was in North Carolina running our unit’s Assessment and Selection, so he would be away from the flagpole and able to talk. Although it sort of pissed me off that he hadn’t called to warn me in the first place. He was still on active duty and tied into the goings-on of the unit we called the Taskforce.

An unorthodox command so far off the books it didn’t even have an official name, it routinely flouted the law to protect civilian lives—and did so successfully. There were many, many souls walking the streets unwitting of how close they had come to seeing the afterlife. Firing me for exceeding the limits of operational risk was like handing out speeding tickets at Daytona. At least that was my opinion.

I pulled up Knuckles on speed dial and it connected on the third ring. “Hey, Pike, what’s up?”

“You got a minute?”

“Yeah, just finished the final. Candidate is a bolo. He’s headed back to the hole. I think he’ll jack it in shortly.” Meaning someone had just failed to solve the problem and was being transported back to the “resistance training laboratory” for more interrogation. Knuckles thought the candidate would quit instead of starting over.

I said, “Call me back secure.”

He did so, saying, “What’s so top secret? You and Koko on the rocks?”

“What’s going on with Colonel Hale?”

“Huh? He’s got some shit sandwich on his plate. How’d you hear about it?”

That meant nothing. Kurt Hale
always
had a shit sandwich on his plate.

“Tell me you didn’t know.”

“Pike, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I got a letter saying Grolier Recovery Services has been fired.”

I heard nothing for a moment, then, “You’re kidding me. They pulled the trigger?”

“You knew?”

He heard the anger coming through and said, “No, no. I told you what was happening after that last mission. The Oversight Council was skittish at how you’d gone on the warpath. They were kicking around letting you go. You’re the one who said Kurt vouched for you. You knew more than
me
six months ago. Last I heard, you were on probation.”

The Oversight Council was our approval authority. Since we were
outside the traditional military or intelligence architecture, we had our own unique command structure. Composed of about a dozen men in the upper echelons of the government, including the president, it dictated Taskforce actions. I’d ignored their orders on our last mission, and now I was apparently paying the price—even though the refusal had ended up preventing a weapon of mass destruction from slaughtering thousands.

“How did you not know this was coming?”

“Pike, I’ve been out here for a month, working eighteen-hour days. I don’t track what the brass is thinking. If I had known it was coming, I would have called.”

I said nothing, the ramifications settling in my stomach like spoiled milk. He had been kept in the dark, which meant the letter was real. They’d known he’d fight it, and so they’d just cut him out. Something that was very easy to do in our cellular, top secret world. The letter wasn’t a sick joke, and I was losing the reason I existed. The thing that made me whole.

He said, “You still there?”

“Yeah. . . . Knuckles, what the hell am I going to do?”

Knuckles heard the pain in my voice and understood why. He lived for the missions the same way I did. I’d been his team leader when I was on active duty, and he’d helped pull me through a traumatic event after I’d left. He’d been the first to sign on as our notional “employee” for the experiment of a civilian company of Operators working inside the Taskforce. The first to embrace Jennifer—a female—as an operational member when everyone else in our testosterone-driven organization wanted to give her the boot without even seeing if she was capable. And the first to ask me to kill the men who’d murdered his teammate on our last mission. The actions that had gotten me fired.

He said, “Pike, I won’t let them erase the database. I’ll keep the documents, leases, contracts, and all that other stuff.”

Meaning, I could be fired on paper, but the enormous cover architecture we’d painstakingly built with Grolier Recovery Services would remain on a shelf, ready to be dusted off. If those linkages were deleted, we’d be done forever. He was telling me what I needed to hear: The
Oversight Council could say what it wanted, but the men who mattered most understood and would protect me.

It meant a lot, but in the end, I wasn’t sure he had the power. The commander would dictate that.

I said, “I’m calling Kurt. See what’s up.”

Colonel Kurt Hale and I had been through more than one scrape together, and—if he weren’t the commander—I would consider him a friend. Hell, he
was
a friend. But he also had to make judgments in the best interest of the Taskforce—not for any single Operator—and if the Oversight Council had spoken, there was nothing he could do.

Knuckles said, “Don’t call him today. Let it sit. He’s way too busy right now, and you won’t get a chance to make your case.”

“Why? What’s going on? Why’s this shit sandwich any worse than our usual stew?”

“I don’t know. I’ve seen some reports, but I’m not sure what it is beyond the fact that everyone inside the Beltway is starting to spin out of control.”

“A threat? Something against the homeland?”

“No, nothing like that. Apparently, somebody’s kid or nephew got killed. A military guy that was related to someone on the House Armed Services Committee. Then somebody else’s kid came up missing.”

“Afghanistan?”

“I don’t know. Yeah, I guess . . . the reports don’t say. I’m just reading between the lines.”

“Why would that have any Taskforce fingerprints? The Armed Services Committee’s not even read onto the program.”

“He’s not, but the vice president is. The kid that’s missing is his son.”