Since Mao Tse-Tung, they had been the masters of unconventional warfare, and this was just one more moment of their success. Why find an aircraft at the bottom of the ocean to learn its secrets when you can make every single one of them irrelevant?
Jake dialed a number on his cell phone and said, “It’s done. And I think it worked.”
Chapter 2
December 2019
Amena spiked the ball and I dove for it, barely able to get it back into the air. A floater that I knew she was going to smash. She leapt up and hammered it again with a little bit of rage. I didn’t even try, watching it bounce away. I looked at her and said, “Really?”
She gave me a little impish grin and said, “I thought your reflexes were quicker. Sorry.”
We were in our small driveway on a narrow lane in Charleston, without even a net, and I knew she’d done it on purpose. All we were supposed to be doing was tapping the ball back and forth, like before a volleyball game, and she had decided to turn it into a contest. I wasn’t sure if it was because she was mad about being forced to leave the house, or upset at herself for agreeing to the plan in the first place.
At thirteen years old, she was taller than most girls her age and was pretty athletic. I’d decided to get her interested in volleyball, because the school she was set to attend had a pretty good team. I’d paid for a couple of lessons, and in so doing had turned her into a monster.
A refugee from Syria, I’d collided with Amena on a mission in Europe after her family had been slaughtered by some very bad men. She’d ended up being pretty critical to saving a lot of lives, and after the loss of her family, she was all alone. So I’d brought her back to America after it was over. Okay, that sounds like I’d gone through the wickets with the U.S. Department of State to introduce a foreign refugee into America, but I hadn’t. I’d basically smuggled her into the country using a covert aircraft belonging to the organization I worked with.
Called Project Prometheus in official top-secret traffic—but just the Taskforce to all of us minions—its sole mission was protecting the United States from attacks that others in the Department of Defense or the CIA couldn’t prosecute, which is to say it operated outside of legal bounds. And therein lay the problem.
I’d basically turned an enormous covert infrastructure into my own personal coyote operation, but instead of bringing a load of Salvadorans across the Rio Grande in the back of a pickup, I’d flown Amena into the United States on a Gulfstream jet leased to my company. It was bad form all the way around, not the least because it could have exposed the entire organization, and with it our less than stellar following of the U.S. Code, but she was worth it. She had prevented a catastrophic attack at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, and she’d deserved the rescue.
Of course, the higher-ups in the Taskforce hadn’t taken that view. Called the Oversight Council, they supervised all Taskforce activity, approving each mission on a case-by-case basis. Except for this one. When they found out what I’d done, they tried to slip her back out of the country and introduce her into the refugee flow out of Syria, but I was having none of that. The odds of her ever showing back up in the United States were marginal at best, and she’d earned the right to be here, regardless of the less than legal means I’d used.
Amena ran into the bushes beside the driveway and grabbed the ball, knowing I wasn’t going to chase it after that hit. She handed it to me and said, “If this isn’t a honeymoon, why can’t I go?”
I took the ball, knowing she was playing me. I said, “It’s not a damn honeymoon. Quit saying that. You can’t go because you have school. You’ve been begging to go to school for months, and today’s the day.”
“But that was before you taught Jennifer to SCUBA dive. Before you planned a trip to Australia. Before the choice was being stuck inside your house or going to school. Now it’s going to Australia or going to school. I’d rather go to Australia. Unless this is a honeymoon for you two . . .”
In the end, me and the National Command Authority of the United States agreed to a compromise, which is a polite way of saying I took on the president of the United States over Amena’s fate. It had been a little bit of a fight, but they’d agreed to wash her documents as having been sponsored by a global company that engaged in worldwide protection of antiquities. A company that was a do-gooder on the world stage, protecting what was honorable and just in the sands of history. My company, Grolier Recovery Services. It was a unique solution, because in truth, while my company did in fact run around the world saving old pottery shards, its sole purpose was to put a bad guy’s head on a spike. But I’d agreed.
The sticking point was that the sponsor had to be something more than a company. It had to be a family unit, with actual names. Which is where Jennifer Cahill, my partner in crime, came in.
If I had a Facebook page, under relationships it would say, “It’s complicated.” Jennifer and I were business partners first and foremost, but we were definitely more than that, if either one of us had the courage to admit it. We’d danced around the commitment to our relationship for years, sometimes falling back onto just the business partner side of things, but always with the benefits side of the house, if you get my meaning.
My feelings had slipped out on occasion, as had hers, but we’d conveniently forgotten those instances, like an embarrassed family member who doesn’t discuss what the drunk uncle blurted out at Thanksgiving.
The truth was I loved her and had just been too damaged to commit—and she had been the same way. Amena had short-circuited all of that angst, forcing us to face reality. Something I was happy about, but I wasn’t so sure about Jennifer.
Because of the immediacy of her situation, Jennifer and I had actually tied the knot at the justice of the peace, becoming officially married, but Jennifer thought it had a veneer of corruption around it. When she’d said “I do,” she’d expected a wedding, but there wasn’t any time for that. We needed to be a family unit immediately—but she was still expecting a ceremony. Which is what Amena was talking about. We couldn’t be taking a honeymoon when we hadn’t had an official wedding ceremony.
I batted the ball to her, saying, “Stop that talk. You’ll just get Jennifer wound up. You’re going to school, and we’re going to Australia. It’s just a vacation.”
The truth of the matter was we were leaving the country solely to make Amena rely on the boarding school she was attending. In effect, to take away her ability to call us every night or come running home for support. I was forcing some tough love, but I couldn’t tell her that.
She hit the ball back, this time with a soft lob setup, and I leapt up and smashed it, driving it past her head and causing her to flinch, the volleyball bouncing into the street behind her. I hit the ground grinning and then heard, “What in the world was that? Are you crazy?”
Amena now sported her own grin, knowing I was going to have my ass handed to me. I turned around and saw Jennifer on the stoop of our Charleston single with a suitcase, looking like she wanted to gut me.
I said, “Hey, wait a minute. You didn’t see what she did earlier. I was just acting like a front line on the court . . . She asked me to do it.”