Not quite six feet tall, Otto liked to play basketball to stay in shape, but mostly he jogged, or really, ran — like he was right now. Sweat dripped onto the front of his gray T-shirt and his feet thudded on the concrete of the street as he ran alone in the cool evening silence. The shirt and his matching gray shorts were both emblazoned with the logo of the FBI; but being with NSA, Otto had many clothes and many IDs with the names of various agencies on them.
Working on mile seven of a ten-mile run, Otto huffed a little, but otherwise ran easily, arms and legs pumping in a natural rhythm. He loved this time of night. Darkness settled on the city, a gentle blue softening the edges of what Seattle had become, post-Pulse; no one to bother him, the job wasn’t pressing on him, the day’s work behind him, and, most important, time to himself, to sort out whatever problems occupied him at the moment.
Tonight’s problem had to do with his boss and partner — that lovely specimen of humanity known as Ames White.
Something was going on behind Otto’s back — or anyway, White was up to something behind Otto’s back — and the NSA agent hated that. He’d suspected White was pursuing a secret agenda, well before the crisis situation at Jam Pony; but, before, Otto had always been able to write off his suspicions about White to the man just being a little... odd.
Otto knew plenty of government agents, and they were all — including himself, he realized — wired up wrong, in some way — even twisted in one fashion or another. Scratch a cop, and find a guy who’s looking for a little piece of personal power; scratch a government agent, and find the same sickness, writ larger.
For the most part, though, these quirks were harmless, outweighed by the sense of civic responsibility that attracted a man to government service. White, however, was a weird, self-absorbed, negative son of a bitch... no question. The man seemed to have two saving graces: competence and patriotism. Only, Otto had started to doubt the latter attribute, wondering if White served some secret master...
Running like this, getting the poison out, usually made Otto dismiss such thoughts as absurd, even silly. But now — after the weird climax of the Jam Pony hostage crisis — whatever suspicions Otto had about White were only magnified, and given weight.
His feet pounding the pavement, Otto let the movie of that night run in his head...
The Seattle detective in charge of the situation, Clemente, seemed to have things in hand until he tried to trade a truck for hostages. Sometime during the exchange, shooting had erupted from somewhere. Otto had seen Clemente order his snipers to pull back, and the snipers did visibly withdraw.
Though he couldn’t prove it, Otto had a suspicion that one of the endless phone calls White made that day was to bring in the group of shooters that queered the exchange.
Otto didn’t know why he felt that — it was just his gut — but over the years, he’d learned to trust his instincts. Then later, after dark, after White had used the botched exchange to gain control of the hostage crisis, Otto approached White just as his partner was slipping on a Kevlar vest handed to him by the female leader of some kind of tactical insertion team — a team unlike any Otto knew of in the NSA lexicon. The group — bizarrely bulked-up types — kept moving, and Otto fell into step with them.
“Sir, what is this?” Otto had asked. “Who are these people?”
White glared at him with typical impatience. “They’re assigned from another agency.”
“What agency? I don’t understand...”
Stopping and turning to face Otto, his sneering features only inches away, White growled, “And let’s keep it that way. You’re not cleared for this op — so pull the men back and secure the perimeter.”
Otto froze, his mind bubbling with protests that couldn’t seem to find their way out through his mouth.
White’s expression tightened further — a handsome man, Ames White became ugly when lines of anger grooved his face... which was frequently. His voice rose: “Walk away. Do it now.”
Not understanding, but unwilling to question a senior officer, Otto had done as he was told.
And it had been less than a half hour later — after the unknown agency’s super-SWAT team emerged from Jam Pony with the perps, loading them into a van and a commandeered ambulance — that one of Clemente’s uniformed cops came up to Otto near the perimeter. The man seemed on the verge of laughter, and Otto couldn’t imagine what there was to laugh about in a hostage crisis.
“They need you inside,” the uniform had said, the words burbling out, mixed in with chuckles.
How weird, how inappropriate, that seemed...
Otto started to call to the other agents, but the uniformed cop put a hand on his shoulder.
“You better go in alone, sir,” the officer said, his amusement lessened, but still there.
Confused, Otto made his way inside the building. He walked slowly through the first floor, where some other uniformed cops were leading three of the hostages toward the door.
“Can you direct me to Agent White?” Otto asked.
One of the uniforms pointed toward the ceiling and walked out, laughing.
What the hell was this?
Climbing the stairs to the second floor, Otto thought he heard what sounded like muffled voices — angry muffled voices. The building was supposed to be secure, but Otto slipped his pistol out of the holster anyway and pulled a penlight from his jacket pocket. Checking carefully, he went through the door of the second floor — it appeared to have been a dressmaker’s loft, long since abandoned, a few naked female mannequins holding court surrealistically among various detritus — and moved closer to the voices.
Coming around a corner, he found the TAC insertion team, in their skivvies, and a fully dressed Agent White — all secured to pillars with Jam Pony packaging tape... all screaming what seemed to be obscenities through the tape gags that covered their mouths, in particular Ames White.
Suddenly Otto knew what the cops were all laughing about, though he himself found the situation humorless.
He holstered his pistol, pocketed the flash, and rummaged in his pants pocket for his knife. “Sir, what happened?” he asked.
White’s answer was thankfully muffled — and for a split second Otto considered turning around and walking out; but he knew it would mean his career. Biting his tongue, he cut them loose, White first, then the others.
The muscular, half-naked commando team left without so much as a thank you — their displeasure (with themselves?) palpable.
Standing there in his ripped suit, peeling pieces of tape off his jacket, his scowling face bloodied, White said, “Go home, Otto. I’ll write up the report and let you see it in the morning.”
“But... what happened here, sir?”
White closed his eyes, obviously fighting for control. One fist balled at his side while the other grabbed a hank of his own hair. He stayed like that for a long moment. Otto realized his boss considered himself a cool customer; but Otto knew that White was in reality a hothead. Anger, frustration, desperation, and finally a kind of unearthly calm all crossed White’s face before he opened his eyes again.
“Now is not the time, Otto,” he said. “Go home and wait for me to call... It might be tomorrow, it might be the next day. Maybe it’ll be Christmas. But just go home — relax. And wait.”
Otto was about to tell White that he couldn’t do that — that standard agency policy demanded otherwise — when the superior agent simply turned and walked out of the cluttered loft. A voice in his head told Otto not to follow, and because the voice — whose message had often been, Cover your ass — had been right so many times in the past, he listened to it.