“Right,” Caruso said. “You want to get closer?”
Chavez nodded. “We can sit at a table in the dining car and have lunch. From there we can get eyes on their compartment through the windows in the vestibule doors. The angle isn’t perfect, but at least if anyone comes or goes we’ll get a look. If the girl makes a trip to the john, I’ll try to get a picture of her. That’s about all two of us can do.”
“I could plant a bug on her or Morozov.”
Chavez shook his head. “We can’t expose ourselves like that. Back when there were more of us, maybe that would have been an option, but with just two of us, we need to play this soft and smart.”
Caruso knew Chavez was right. The team was smaller now than it used to be, and every day in the field something reminded them of this fact.
4
John Clark felt the enormous impact of Arlington National Cemetery — he appreciated the majesty of the 624 acres, and the sacrifice of the 400,000 buried there. But the truth of the matter was… John Clark wasn’t much on visiting graves.
It was no sign of disrespect to the departed; on the contrary, he saw those who worshipped tombstones to be the ones who failed to remember the fallen as they wanted to be remembered. He’d lost many friends over the years, and it was important to him that he remembered them all, but he told himself he did not need to go to their final resting place in order to do it.
But despite his reservations, he was here today at Arlington, in the cold rain, his umbrella forgotten in his car, and he stood over the grave of a friend.
The headstone said very little, and much of what it said was untrue.
SAMUEL REID DRISCOLL
1SG
U.S. ARMY
JUNE 26, 1976–MAY 5, 2016
PURPLE HEART
AFGHANISTAN
The name was right, though he went by Sam. The rank and service were correct as well, but Sam had left the Army Rangers years before he died. The birth date was accurate, though his actual date of death was a few weeks off from the one hewn into the white marble. Clark was absolutely certain of this, because Clark had been just fifty feet away from Sam when he died.
And unless Afghanistan had been somehow picked up and moved south of the U.S. border, the location of his death was incorrect as well.
Sam Driscoll had been shot dead by a North Korean intelligence agent in a dark hallway of a luxury villa an hour outside Mexico City.
No, the marker didn’t mention any of that.
And while it was true that all the misinformation and errors of omission on Sam Driscoll’s tombstone bothered Clark a little, he knew they were for the best. The marker could not have said Sam was an operations officer for an off-the-books intelligence shop called The Campus, and it sure as hell couldn’t have stated the fact that Sam had been down in Mexico hunting the people behind the nearly successful assassination attempt on the President of the United States.
Sam had been good, no doubt he was a hell of a lot better than the North Korean who killed him — a man who, in the same instant, died at Sam’s hand. But Sam had been dealing with multiple attackers, and while he got them, both of them… one of them got lucky in his last breath.
There are no promises in combat. When men are in fierce battle for their lives, fighting hand to hand and slinging hot lead at one another with a muzzle velocity of a thousand feet a second, bad shit is bound to happen, and to Sam, bad shit did.
John Clark stood there in the rain and thought about that night in Cuernavaca for another moment, but then he thought about his own life, his own mortality. It was hard not to do, standing here in a massive garden of stone, each white slab of rock representing another man or another woman, each with his or her own story about how the end came.
A hundred thousand ways to die; the only constant to these markers was that virtually everyone buried beneath them had, in some way, served the United States of America, and many of them, a great many, had lost their lives while in that service.
Just like Sam.
It wasn’t fair.
John Clark was sixty-seven years old. Sam Driscoll had been twenty-seven years younger than Clark, and many of the other men and women buried here at Arlington had been half Sam’s age when they’d met their maker.
Nope, not fair at all.
If he could, Clark would have taken the bullet to the heart that dropped Sam Driscoll, but Clark had been in harm’s way the vast majority of his lifetime, and if there was one thing he had learned, it was that there wasn’t one damn bit of sense involved in any of this, and even with all the skill in the world, there is a pervasive randomness to a gunfight.
John looked around at thousands of white tombstones.
Anything can happen; the good guys can die, too.
Slowly, very slowly, he remembered the flowers in his hand.
If Clark wasn’t one to stand at gravesites, he really wasn’t the sort to walk around carrying flowers. But this wasn’t his idea. No, it was the fulfillment of a promise.
At Sam’s funeral he met Edna Driscoll, the mother of the deceased. She knew nothing about how her son died; in fact, she knew only that her son had left the Army and had taken a job for a private contractor involved with homeland security. She understood his work was top-secret and he could not discuss it, but she did not know it would prove to be even more dangerous than his time in the 75th Ranger Regiment.
At the funeral, Clark expressed his condolences seriously and solemnly to the gaunt and drawn woman, but when she’d asked for details of her son’s death, all Clark could tell her was that he’d died for his country.
It was the God’s honest truth, and he hoped it would be enough, but he’d been through this before, and he knew.
It was never enough.
Clark’s wife, Sandy, had come to his rescue, as she had done at so many funerals in the past. She stepped into the conversation, introduced herself, and then directed Edna Driscoll away. She commiserated with her, and after the service, Sandy asked the woman if the two could stay in touch.
It was an act of kindness, a chance for a widow from Nebraska who lost her son to have some small connection to those he served with, although she did not understand who or what they were.
Sandy contacted Edna a few days later and told her an account representing her fallen son’s pension had been established as part of his compensation package with the private security contractor, and it was all hers, and when Sandy told her the amount in the account, Edna Driscoll was even more confused about her son’s employer.
She found $3 million to be a shockingly large sum, but still, it was no replacement for her loss.
And then, a few weeks after Sam was buried and the account was settled, his mother e-mailed Sandy Clark with a request. She said she was overcome with sadness by the fact she was sure the flowers she’d left at her son’s grave had by now withered and died, and she wondered if Sandy wouldn’t mind placing a fresh bouquet on the headstone from time to time.
Sandy and John lived in Emmitsburg, Maryland, which wasn’t exactly next door to Arlington National Cemetery, but this was lost on the woman from a little town outside Omaha, so Sandy agreed, promising Edna she’d take care of it.
John Clark would have loved for his wife to do just that, to take care of it — cemeteries were not his thing, after all — but Arlington was on the way to his office in Alexandria, so it made no sense for Sandy to make the drive when he could do it so much more easily.
And now he was back again for a third delivery of flowers. John placed them on Sam’s headstone, feeling the weight of the deaths of Sam and all the others around him, but soon he shook out of it. He wasn’t too sentimental about all this. He missed Sam and felt the same amount of responsibility for the man’s death as he had for others who had died under his leadership, but Sam wasn’t here, lying under this headstone, under this dirt.