Lai drew the napkin toward her and dropped the thumb-size memory bank into her designer purse. “Good. Anything else you need from us?”
“Get me on a cargo plane full of toys, or some such, heading for Canada.”
“Sure. But why Canada? What’s in Canada?” she asked.
“Safety,” he said. “Moose and safety.”
29
What price success? Marty Atkins pondered that question at his desk. Back when he was a young man, he considered the world to be his oyster. By going to work for the Central Intelligence Agency, he believed that he could do anything: be stronger than a locomotive, or fly across entire continents in a single bound. He was in line to eventually become director of the entire agency. That was now probably out the window. Superman was a make-believe cartoon, and Atkins lived in the real world, which was why he’d been mentally drafting a letter of resignation. Before this was all over, somebody at the CIA was going to have to fall on his or her sword. He was the likely scapegoat.
The quick and hard military attack to secure the drug town of Girdiwal in Afghanistan had worked with precise efficiency. The world saw the results on television. The CIA proved it had nothing to hide and wasn’t running a Middle East drug bazaar.
So why was that pesky congresswoman from Nebraska hanging so tough with her accusations? Perhaps the agency wasn’t out of the woods of public opinion yet.
Added to that public relations problem was the loss of two of his best operatives. Luke Gibson was a total asshole of a traitor who had fooled them for years and was still on the loose. God alone knew what damage he’d done, what secrets he’d compromised, how many lives he’d cost. Atkins already had an internal investigation under way.
Kyle Swanson, the indestructible sniper, was immobile in traction, shut off from his own senses in an induced coma at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center outside Ramstein Air Base in Germany. His condition was listed as critical, with a seriously injured neck.
“How soon can he be evacuated?” asked Willa Kent, one of the interrogation specialists on the internal investigation team. She was a quiet, unthreatening brunette who had earned her psychology degree at Purdue and developed her interviewing chops down in Guantánamo.
She and a second psychiatrist, Tom Hughes, had been invited to Atkins’s office in Langley so that Marty could deliver the news personally. “He cannot be moved right now, so you guys have to go over there.”
“If he’s in a coma, what’s the point?” asked Hughes, a thin man in his mid-thirties. Far from being a beard-pulling shrink, Hughes ran Ironman competitions and had piercing steel-gray eyes that missed little.
Which was why Atkins didn’t look at him. “If not an actual interview at this point, you can provide an accurate assessment of his condition. Kyle cannot be moved for several more weeks, according to the med staff in Germany. And his parents want to put him in a first-class private facility in England, not back here. So you have to go there.”
Hughes, who was also a doctor, read the brief Army medical report. “He had a brain concussion and herniated disks and still carried on with the mission? Ouch. The pain must have been excruciating.”
Atkins was of the opinion that continuing the mission would probably have been impossible for a normal human being. Tom Hughes understood how a body could be forced to work beyond its limits. “The two guys who brought him out said that Swanson collapsed as soon as they got aboard the extract helicopter. Like all the wind escaped from a balloon,” he said.
“Adrenaline dump,” Willa Kent concluded. “He was so pumped up during the action that it overrode the pain. When it was over, he had no reason to continue blocking it, and it all slammed him at once.”
She tapped the arm of the chair. “The family is still going to demand that he be moved. We’ll have to talk them out of that so we can keep him in secure custody.”
Atkins reminded them both that Kyle Swanson was not some terrorist and would not be treated as one. “He will remain sedated and immobile right where he is for a couple of weeks to give his body some time to heal and rest. Sir Jeff Cornwell might send in a private specialist, but I’ve informed him there’s no real need for that. This hospital has handled casualties from the war for more than a decade. They’ve seen it all before and know what they’re doing.”
“So, a month?”
“I’m not a doctor, guys. It is what it is. Maybe getting a civilian specialist in there to take a look would be a good idea.”
“Silly question, but is Swanson safe?”
“Yes. He’s listed as a John Doe in the intensive-care unit of a Level III Trauma Center at an American military base. Nobody is going to bother him. Security is tight.” Atkins kept his face devoid of anything but sympathy and worry.
Hughes asked, “Why doesn’t this file include the latest X-rays? I could tell a lot more about his condition.”
Atkins dodged. “You should have a fresh set made when you get there. Your prime assignment is to examine the overall situation and find any clues that might lead us to our traitor, Luke Gibson. Beyond that, figure out when Kyle will recover fully and how we can help.”
Kent said, “Healing is one thing, but combat is another, sir. Beyond the physical damage, which appears substantial, there will be severe psychological challenges — maybe a lifetime of PTSD. I think our boy may soon be looking for another line of work.”
Marty hated lying to these good people, but he had a story to tell. What price success?
Nero sat still as a rock, the big head cocked to one side, watching his Alpha lying almost as still on the forest’s verdant floor twenty feet away. Elizabeth Ledford Castillo was in a Ghillie suit that she had spent the morning making from local vegetation, and she looked like a bush. Coastie glanced over at the German shepherd, who didn’t break from the command to remain still. His nose picked up her scent, magnified it, and he knew she was okay although he could barely see her. The bush extended her hand, flat and with a downward motion, and the dog dropped to his belly.
Coastie had thrown herself into training after being read the riot act by Double-Oh. She had been behaving like a fool; she knew that now. The loss of her husband had almost sent her around the bend with grief, excused her inexcusable decisions, and left her feeling lost and vulnerable. The only thing she was really good at was shooting a weapon and killing bad guys, and it was impossible to find solace in bloodlust. It was hard to forget.
She dug her toe into the damp soil and hauled her bushy self a few inches. Her goal today was to approach the camp without being seen, but that was going to be impossible as long as Nero thought she might need his guard-dog skills, big white teeth, and muscled frame. He stuck to her like glue. She pushed another foot forward and scanned the area, seeing nobody. Coastie was invisible, but sneaking around undetected in the woods of northern Vermont wasn’t exactly rocket science.
The suit was itchy. She ignored it. Part of the challenge of being a scout/sniper was being able to put up with a few inconveniences, such as mosquitoes and rain and cold. All part of the training, which seemed meaningless in their individual parts but, taken together, could cost or save a life. Today was better than yesterday, and Mexico seemed very far away. Confidence was seeping back into the sniper, and courage would follow.
“Hey, Coastie! Double-Oh wants you at the office.” Lieutenant Nina Blume, whose truck had been kicked around by an IED in Afghanistan, was at the camp trying to make sense of what had happened to her on that lonely, dusty road two years earlier, and how and why she survived when the others died.