“I haven’t been over to his house yet,” Savannah said. “I can’t. It’s just too…” She cleared her throat, still going through her purse. “My father hired a company. They come in after somebody dies and pack up all their clothes, personal effects, clean up the mess. Can you imagine a job like that? Anyway, I was going through a box of Arlo’s things the other night, and I found this.”
She pulled out a wallet-size photograph from her purse and slid it toward me across the desk. I exhaled like I was doing her a big favor picking it up:
The photo was of Echevarria and me, taken in the Nubo-Sindian Desert. Our cheeks were streaked with camouflage face paint and eight days of Iranian dust. We were outfitted in battle dress devoid of rank or unit insignia. Sprawled at our boots was a bearded Arab, arms splayed above his head, his eyes half-hooded in death, the front of his white dishdasha man-dress splotched red from multiple gunshot wounds. In Echevarria’s right hand was a Kalashnikov assault rifle with a collapsible stock and extended banana clip. His left hand was clamped affectionately on my shoulder. He was beaming at the camera like a safari hunter posing with a trophy lion, while I stared grimly into the lens, thoroughly exhausted.
I’d forgotten how slight Echevarria was. His combat uniform hung from his bony frame like a protestor on a hunger strike, yet there was no denying his raw physical appeal. The pale green eyes so inconsistent with the bronze Mayan skin. The high cheekbones. The aquiline nose. The lips curved perpetually in an impish little boy’s smile.
“I showed that picture to the police,” Savannah said. “They said they didn’t know what to make of it.”
I flipped it back across the desk. “Picture’s a fake,” I said.
“Fake? What’re you talking about?”
“Going-away party. The guy on the ground worked in accounts receivable. Got a bookkeeping job with Halliburton in Baghdad. We squirted catsup on him, told him to lay there and look like roadkill so he could get an idea of what he had to look forward to. It was all a big joke.”
“That’s the biggest bunch of bullshit I’ve ever heard. That man is dead, Logan. Arlo killed him. Or you did.”
I put my feet back up on my desk, clasped my hands behind my head once more and stared at her blankly.
“Logan, Arlo’s dead. He’s dead, OK? There’s no reason to keep covering up everything. Why can’t you just talk to me? That’s all I’m asking. Be honest with me. For once in your life. I’m begging you. Please.”
I’ll admit it. I got off watching her grovel. Probably too much. But unless you’ve been there, sitting within tactile proximity of a woman who once carved your heart out and stomped on it like Carlo Rossi come grape harvest, you’d probably never understand.
“Was it the CIA? At least tell me that much.”
I forced a chuckle. “That’s one thing I always did like about you, Savannah. You always did have a healthy imagination.”
She looked away, nostrils flaring, like a bull about to charge. “Do you really think I didn’t notice? All the late night phone calls, the last minute ‘business trips’? All the lies? It was no different with you than it was with him, Logan. How stupid do you really think I am?”
As dispassionately as I could, I said, “Arlo Echevarria ran a marketing company. I worked for him. I respected him. Until he stole my wife.”
Savannah slung her bag angrily over her shoulder and stood, then slowly, deliberately, leaned toward me over my desk, her palms flat on the worn gray metal.
“I’m not going to tell you how much I despise you,” she said, her mahogany eyes burning holes in my soul. “You can figure that out yourself.”
For the second time that morning, I watched a beautiful woman walk out of my life. The only difference was, this one I cared about.
Only after she’d gone did I notice that she’d left behind the photograph of Echevarria and me.
THREE
I can’t say whether there was a second gunman in Dallas the day JFK was assassinated, though anyone familiar with the elegant efficiency of your basic L-shaped ambush could take one look at the sixth floor sniper’s nest and the stockade fence behind the grassy knoll on Dealey Plaza and draw their own conclusions. I can’t say whether it was a flying saucer outside Roswell in 1957, or whether Elvis is alive and well and eating chili dogs with Marilyn Monroe on some obscure island in the Mediterranean. What I can say with certainty is that, until very recently, in the name of national security, the government of the United States relied on a select handful of men to do its dirty work in places and ways that never once made the network news.
The agency to which these men reported was classified Tier One Ultra and code-named Alpha, a purposeful tip of the hat to Alfa, Russia’s most elite counterterrorism unit. Known only within highly compartmentalized circles, Alpha showed up on no Defense Department orders of battle. There was never a mention of it in any Congressional budget reports, nor on any blogs. No Tweets. Culled from the various branches of America’s military and intelligence apparatus for their individual skills, elite operators assigned to Alpha surrendered all formal rank and title. They were referred to synonymously as “go-to guys.”They were hunter-killers, these men, honed in the arts of asymmetric warfare and oblivious to the sovereignty of treaties or international borders. They proved an invaluable weapon in the fight against global terrorism. But they were not invulnerable to the vagaries of shifting political winds. The current administration, fearing scandal if word of Alpha’s actions ever were fully known, quietly ordered the group disbanded within a month of Inauguration Day. White House officials past and present will deny there were ever any “go-to guys.” But I know there were because I was one of them. And so, too, was Arlo Echevarria.
I’d be on the next Con Air flight to Super Max were I to divulge all that we did. That’s how nondisclosure agreements work. Sign one, tell a few tales out of school, and the next thing you know, you’re bunking with Robert Hanssen and stamping out license plates the rest of your life. So you’ll excuse me if I’m a bit vague on operational details — target ID’s, mission locations, and the like. What I can tell you, though, is how Echevarria and I worked together, how I initially revered him, and how, ultimately, I wished him dead.
For me, it began in college.
We were playing New Mexico at Albuquerque my senior year. With time about to expire before halftime, I snagged a pass cutting across the middle and turned to run upfield when the Lobos’ 240-pound middle linebacker, a first-round NFL prospect with “I Shall Fear No Man But God” tattooed across his throat, separated me from my cleats. The football went one way; the major structural ligaments of my right knee the other. And so ended my collegiate gridiron career. Fortunately for me, playing football was not the only reason the Air Force put me through college.
Flash forward ten years. I’m flying A-10 Warthogs. The ’Hog sometimes gets a bad rap from other fighter pilots who drive ships with pointier noses, but there’s no better platform when it comes to blowing up stuff. I blew up stuff real good all over the world— and got paid well to do it, too. Tanks. Republican Guardsmen. Miscellaneous terrorists. A total blast. Literally. Then, during an otherwise routine six-month physical, my friendly flight surgeon asked if I had any squawks. I made the mistake of telling him half-jokingly that I was considering applying for work at the Weather Channel because I could always tell when a low pressure system was moving in based on how lousy my surgically reconstructed knee felt. The doctor bent and prodded my lower leg this way and that, then concluded that the joint had atrophied beyond acceptable Air Force standards. I was ruled unfit to fly. At that moment, no longer a fighter pilot, I could’ve just as easily been ruled unfit to continue living.