“You don’t get paid to rat out a colleague.”
Uzi snorted. “You think I should’ve kept my mouth shut?”
Shepard looked away. “From my seat, you did the right thing. I just wish… I just wish it never happened. It’s bad all around.”
Uzi gave a conciliatory nod.
“I’m leaving him on the job. For now. You’ll have to deal with that.”
“Your decision. You’re the boss.”
Shepard shook his head. “You know I’d go to the end of the Earth for you, man. But some things I can’t protect you from.”
Uzi’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t need your protection. I can take care of myself.”
Shepard rested two beefy elbows on his desk. “That’s never been an issue. But this is different. It’s not a criminal with a gun or a terrorist with a bomb… This is an enemy different from anything you’ve ever dealt with. The enemy’s your own unit, and they’re pissed as hell. They may never forgive you. You’ve gotta be prepared for that. That’s a lot to deal with, on top of, well… you know.”
“Not like I’ll ever forget.”
Shepard looked down. A moment of silence passed, then he asked, “And that brings me to why I wanted to meet with you. Whatever happened with that shrink?”
Uzi let his eyes wander to the television screen. “Stupid talking heads. None of ’em predicted such a close election. Not one of them.”
“You never saw her, did you?”
Uzi tilted his head. “President Glendon Rusch. Has a ring to it, don’t you think?”
“It’d be a good idea, especially because of what’s happened. The shrink can help. Your plate’s been full, and this Osborn thing’s only going to make it… fuller.”
Uzi tore his gaze from the television. “Thanks for the cliché. And for the advice.”
“Here’s the thing, Uzi. It’s not advice. Not this time. It’s mandatory. If you want to remain in Washington. If you don’t, then it’ll be up to your new ASAC to determine what should be done.”
Uzi’s eyes widened. “Shep, don’t do this to me—”
“Your macho side doesn’t want to spill your guts to a woman, fine. You want someone closer to home, fine. No excuses this time.”
“Shep, please—”
“You should be thanking me for circumventing an EAP,” Shepard said, referring to the FBI’s in-house Employee Assistance Program that required a counselor to talk with an agent before sending him to a psychiatrist. “Besides, you did it to yourself. I’m just trying to keep my people happy. And right now they’re not very happy. You need to get some help and I need to keep things under control. Control’s important right now. For your sake.”
Uzi bit his lower lip.
“I’ve got someone else for you to see.”
“You’d really transfer me if I don’t see a shrink?”
“And by see him, I mean actually go. Talk to him, work with him. For as long as he sees fit.”
“What about what I think?”
“I’ve cut you a lot of slack the past few years, Uzi. I’ve given you a lot of leeway in how you run your unit. Time’s come for you to do it my way.”
Uzi looked away.
“Way I see it, you ratted out Osborn because what he did struck too close to home. He reminds you of yourself. That’s it, isn’t it?”
Uzi stood up and leaned his palms on Shepard’s desk. “I don’t need this bullshit. Especially now.” His face had turned crimson and his eyes were wide. “I did what I did because it was right. DIOG says so,” he said, referring to the Bureau’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide. “So don’t be giving me any psychological mumbo jumbo explanation about how my actions had some deeper meaning.”
The two men stared at each other for a long moment.
“Sit. Down.”
Uzi took his seat.
“You want to stay in Washington?”
“Yes.”
“Thought so,” Shepard said. “You’ll be seeing Dr. Leonard Rudnick. You have an appointment with him tomorrow, eight o’clock.” He reached into his drawer and tossed a business card in Uzi’s direction.
Uzi scraped it off the desk. “Twenty-three eleven M Street. Two blocks from my house.”
“Incentive to keep your appointments. Besides, he’s a good man. You’ll like him.”
Uzi snorted. “Right.”
The buzz on the phone made Uzi jump. Shepard lifted the handset and listened, his eyes narrowing, a noticeable layer of perspiration breaking out across his forehead. “Thank you,” he whispered into the phone, then let the handset drop from his ear. His stunned gaze met Uzi’s.
“What’s wrong?” Uzi asked.
“Marine Two went down in a field forty miles from here.” The two men were silent as they absorbed the impact of the statement. After a few seconds of silence, Shepard got to his feet. “Chopper’s on its way to pick you up. Carolyn has the GPS coordinates. Get ’em and get out there. Now.”
Paramedic Dell Gibbons and his partner had just returned from a three-car pileup on the interstate when the call came over the radio: a helicopter had crashed in a field just inside their patrol sector. Gibbons had to pee and his stomach was grumbling. But he shoved the rig into gear and headed off toward the nighttime countryside.
The paramedics were followed by a fire truck, three “attack engines,” and a couple of water tenders, sirens screaming as they rumbled down the roadway.
His partner leaned closer to the two-way radio that had spurted static a few seconds earlier. “Repeat?”
“That’s Marine Two that went down,” the dispatcher said. “The veep’s chopper.”
“The vice president?” Gibbons asked. “Holy shit.” He had the feeling he was about to enter a scene on par with the medics who had responded to the shooting of President John F. Kennedy. Well, almost on par. He felt a part of history. All the offhand remarks his mother had made about him not pursuing her dream of him becoming a doctor would be silenced forever. He would be one of the few who had responded to the scene when Vice President Rusch’s helicopter went down.
But as he tooled along the highway, he realized that his mother’s silence would last but a moment. Then she would tell him he could have been the doctor called upon to treat the vice president instead of “just” the paramedic who had transported him to the hospital.
“I read an article about these helicopters in some military magazine,” his partner said. “They got all kinds of special protection, lasers and shit like that. They can take enemy fire, even missiles, I think, and still keep flying.”
“Yeah, well, this one ain’t still flying.”
Seven minutes after the call, Gibbons and his partner were first on the scene, arriving seconds ahead of the county sheriff and the fire trucks. The medics quickly surveyed the carnage, keeping a distance from the flames that stretched high into the sky, fed by an abundant supply of spilled Jet A fuel. Though less flammable than gasoline, the high performance kerosene burned very hot. Explosion wasn’t merely possible, but likely.
The firefighters jumped from their rigs and deployed their heavy inch-and-a-half hoses across the vast area of burning debris. In less than a minute, water was pumping onto the wreckage, followed seconds later by aqueous film forming foam designed to cap the fire and flammable liquids by suffocating them.
In short order, they cleared a narrow path for Gibbons and his partner to begin their search for survivors. But before Gibbons could move ten feet, he saw something off to his right: a man on the ground, crawling, trying to get to his hands and knees, without much success… dangerously close to the tip of a swirl of violent flames.