Hannah thought for a moment and then her cell phone buzzed in her pocket. She retrieved it and saw the name on her screen.
‘It’s LeMay,’ she said.
‘You gonna answer it?’ Vaughn asked.
‘What the hell else can I do?!’ Hannah snapped as she answered the phone.
‘Ford.’
‘Special Agent Ford, I need you to travel to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and catch Flight 275 for Hong Kong immediately. Seats have been reserved. There’s been a breakthrough in the case.’
‘Yes sir.’
‘Report back to me when you reach Hong Kong. An agent named Bradley Hinkley will liaise with you at the field office inside the US Consulate Building.’
‘Yes sir.’
The line went dead and Hannah looked at Vaughn. ‘Looks like we’re off to Hong Kong.’
‘Just like that?’ Vaughn asked. ‘Why send us and not assign agents from the local field office?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hannah admitted. ‘He says we’ll be briefed when we get there.’
‘I don’t much like this,’ Vaughn said as they started walking. ‘Maybe Jarvis really is onto something.’
‘Yeah,’ Hannah said without conviction, ‘but what really interests me is why Ethan Warner is in Iraq — Jarvis let that much slip. What the hell is he doing out there and if it’s connected with some great conspiracy involving this Majestic Twelve then what does it have to do with LeMay sending us to Hong Kong?’
Vaughn did not have an answer for her as they walked back through the glade toward their pool car.
XVII
He felt bleak, despite the bright blue sky and warm sunshine filtering down through the canopy of trees overhead.
A narrow path wound through the woodland of Little Falls Park alongside the Potomac, a popular local destination where families gathered to picnic and unwind after a busy week. But he walked alone, favoring the solitude and the silence that the middle of the week brought to this area.
Aaron J Mitchell walked with a slight limp, still carrying the injury to his ribs he had sustained two months before when he had violently encountered Ethan Warner. Both of them were former Marines, although Mitchell had gone on to serve with the Navy SEALS and should have bested Warner despite his opponent’s youth. Yet he had not, and it had only been chance that had allowed him to escape the encounter.
The wound to his pride ached with a far sharper pain than the wound to his body. Time was not on Aaron’s side and for the first time it had cost him a victory in a game where the stakes were so high, failure really could be fatal.
It had occurred to him, on the few occasions when he allowed his mind to dwell on abstract reverie that his father would have glowed with pride at the sheer scale of that which Aaron had achieved. His father had served with distinction in the United States Army during the final year of the Second World War, a decorated soldier who had inspired in his fellow men the realization that anything was possible, even for a negro. As had happened many times before in an ancient and tragic irony, it had been the conflict of men that had thus conceived the respect of those fellow men hitherto considered inferior by the society of the time. Aaron, when his own time had come more than twenty years later, had followed in his fathers’ footsteps, joining the United States Marine Corps just in time to find himself cast into the steaming jungles of South East Asia and a conflict of unimaginable, incomparable brutality that had ingrained into Aaron’s mind the singular and special evil of mankind. Aaron had served two tours in Vietnam, had been himself decorated twice. During that period, a number of events that were to shape Aaron’s life occurred.
The first was his father’s death of chronic heart disease. The ailment, the result of years of smoking after the war, had afflicted his body during Aaron’s last years with him, but the sudden loss of his father was a terrible blow to the young soldier, who once again returned to the battlefield because there was nothing left for him anywhere else on earth. There Aaron witnessed the sheer terror of battle, the fear of ambush, the brutal nature of the jungle and all of its attendant dangers.
Aaron had returned after his second tour to the United States, taking up a role as an instructor. For two years he had trained young men to take to the field against the enemy and watched them return in boxes, if at all. For two years he had wrestled with psychological demons, the nightmares and the self — enforced solitude, the images of those terrible jungles that infected his scarred and broken mind. Throughout that time he had believed that he may never recover the self that was Aaron James Mitchell, so brutalised was he by the terrors he had witnessed. Diagnosed with what was then termed “shell — shock”, Aaron had been honorably discharged from the Corps in the midst of the public backlash against the Vietnam campaign. Unable to find work or even a home, like so many formerly decent soldiers he had become a vagrant, abandoned by the country he had fought for.
A year later, while scratching a meagre existence on Washington DC’s hard streets, he had been approached by a man from the Pentagon who had taken him into a hostel down Rock Creek way, cleaned him up and provided him with food and shelter. Aaron, too weary to care why anybody would provide for him without asking anything in return, accepted the assistance. There were others in the hostel, all former soldiers with nowhere to go. After a few days of leisure, about half of them were gathered into a room and informed of why they were there.
Aaron had listened with interest to the hour — long lecture, during which a suit from the Pentagon informed them that they were being recruited into a covert unit. They were free to leave if they did not wish to serve, and that their service would be neither strictly military or government but somewhere between the two. There would be no medals, no public recognition, nothing other than a cause and a career.
Half of the men in the room left afterward to once again take their chances on the streets, too embittered by their abandonment by both government and the people to even consider serving once again. Aaron had looked out at those streets and realized that there was nothing and nobody out there for him. At least here he had a cause, something to work for. And work he had for thirty years, until he had reached a sufficient level of trust and superiority to discover that the Pentagon knew nothing of what he did and nor did the administration. Aaron James Mitchell worked for Majestic Twelve.
‘You’re late.’
The voice broke Aaron from his reverie and he looked to his right to see an old man join him from another path. The man was shorter than Aaron, aged now by the passing of so many years, but still recognizable as the suit who had first lectured Aaron and his fellow vagrants thirty years before.
‘Past caring,’ Aaron replied as they strolled.
Victor Wilms looked up at Aaron through rheumy eyes. ‘Finally reached the limit,’ he said calmly. ‘It happens to everybody, Aaron. I’m surprised you’ve lasted this long.’
‘You doubted me?’ Aaron asked.
‘Not at all,’ Victor replied. ‘I figured that at some point you would lose patience and execute every one of us! You know that you’re the last man standing, don’t you, from that class?’
‘No, I did not.’
‘They’re all long gone, Aaron. Some quit, some got injured and were relieved of duty, some were killed and the rest vanished in various God — forsaken corners of the globe, never to be seen again.’
‘I’ll count myself lucky.’