Old Growth & Ivy (The Spook Hills Trilogy Book 1) (5 page)

“Bad
timing on my part,” he said quietly by way of apology.

She
nodded stiffly, knowing she should laugh it off but she wasn’t quite back in
command of herself.  He walked closely behind her to her office, watched
her go to her desk, and then turned back to the meeting room.

Two
hours later, the three agents filed in to Ivy’s office as she finished a
conference call.  She forced a smile, doing her best to appear like her
usual self.  Steve hovered near the doorway.

Brian
said quietly.  “We left our working models on your server.  Please
have them archived along with the data.”

Moll
joined in, “And we checked each other’s laptops to be sure we didn’t have any
copies or residual files.  Be seeing you.  Uh, you’ve been great,
helping us.  Thank Terry for me – he’s like my brain-twinner.”

Brian
smiled his sweet smile.  “Thank you.  Ivy, you’re the best.”

“Glad
to be of help.  Call me if either of you are back in Portland. 
Should you need anything more, you have my business card.” 

The two
agents filed out.  Steve walked into her office to stand staring out the
window.  He turned to face her.  “Mt. Hood is unbelievable, isn’t
it?  Almost like a fantasy mountain.”

“Even
to those of us who see the mountain every day, well every day she is out, the
view provides inspiration.”

“She?”

“Yes,
that is the way us locals refer to the Mountain.  Not sure why. 
Perhaps because she is so graceful.  Or perhaps because somewhere
underneath that beauty lies a powerful earth force that could erupt without
warning, the way Mt. St. Helens did.”

“Reminds
me of someone I recently met – elegantly attractive but potentially volatile.”

“I
assume you mean me.  Well, I’ll take part of it as a compliment,” Ivy said
with a smile, back in command of her temper.

Steve
walked closer to her.  “Thank you, Ms. Littleton.  Your cooperation
has given us a place to start digging, which is far more than we had
before.  It also has given us some indicators on how large this operation
might be.”

Despite
her annoyance with him, Ivy could not help asking, “How do you know that? 
Apply experience?”

“Guesses. 
Never handled a matter quite like this one.  Just in case I need to
follow-up on something in a hurry, could I have your home phone and personal
cell?”

“Seems
like I am always working or checking my work cell,” she said grudgingly.
 “Oh well, you probably can find them out anyway.” 

She
pulled out another business card and wrote down the two numbers, then added her
personal email.  “Let me know how the case turns out.”

Surprised
by her request, Steve nodded and moved towards the door, then stopped and
turned back. 

“Goodbye
Ivy.  You really are the best,” he said softly.

While he waited for takeoff on the FBI
plane, nicknamed the “Bubird” at the Bureau that Friday afternoon, Steve
realized it was his birthday -- October 5th, 1952.  He turned 60 that day
almost without realizing it.  They were heading to New York to drop off
Brian and Moll who worked out of that office, and then he would take the short
hop down to D.C. where he was based.  Using the Bubird allowed them to
work in privacy and reduced their travel time.  The complex cases they
handled meant that dedication and long hours were critical to their success,
and they were always successful, no matter how long it took.  He smiled a
bit dourly to himself at their failure in Manzanillo, yet he was proud of their
overall record.  They would apprehend that evasive drug lord who eluded
them in Mexico and they sure as hell were going to nail this child trafficking
perp.

Putting his laptop aside, Steve leaned
his head back and thought about the importance of this milestone birthday.
 Sixty years of his life were now behind him, along with most of his
career.  He wondered how long he could hold on with the Bureau.  For
sure as long as the Chief stayed, although the President was overdue on
appointing a replacement.  The Chief, Robert Mueller (or Mule as Steve
sometimes called him), had been appointed by George W. Bush and had stayed on
under President Obama.  Sooner or later when that changed, Steve would
likely be forced to retire.  Every year their Human Resources folks
reviewed agents over 57, the mandatory retirement age for those in field
work.  Every year the Chief stepped in and extended him.  While the
FBI had been his home for Steve’s adult life, age was catching up with
him.  Without the Bureau, how would he spend the next 10, 20, or even 30
years?

When his career was over, Steve
worried that he would be empty, bereft and alone, with nothing to occupy his
days, challenge his mind or get his adrenaline running.  Without the
Bureau, how would his life have value?  For the last few years, he had
been searching for more inside himself, trying to find additional facets of his
personality and character.  To enrich his mind, search for his heart and
reach out towards his soul, he had read the classics and more contemporary
literature.  He pondered the precepts of Confucius and Buddha. Still he
wondered, h
ow does a man find his heart, much less
his soul? 

His mind drifted back to
his boyhood when each day seemed to glisten with promise.  He saw himself
with his Dad early on a Saturday morning fishing in a nearby stream.  They
never caught much other than some sunnies.  Being out there together was
the important part.  His Dad, tall with thinning blonde hair, had been a
serious man, somewhat strict, yet always supportive.  When he spoke, he
carried a lilting Norwegian accent.  A small-town lawyer by trade, his Dad
inspired confidence and dedicated himself to making things right for
people.  One day Steve wanted to learn more about the Norwegian life
philosophy that formed his parents' thinking and contributed to his own. 

Steve thought about a
quote he had seen recently, "
In the end these things matter most: How well did you
love?  How fully did you live?  How deeply did you learn to let go?"
  He knew he lacked good responses to
those questions of the heart.  Inside he had a great emptiness. 
While he believed he could find the depth to answer each question within
himself, his life thus far had been emotionally shallow and not overly
broad.  He assumed he was capable of deep feelings, even though he had
never fully tested that belief, making him
keenly aware of his
narrowness as a man.  What happened to that boy out catching sunnies with
his Dad, back when life seemed as dazzling as the sun sparkling on the currents
in the stream?  He closed his eyes and pictured the stream as it wove
through farmland and into the woods where dappled light played on the rippling
water and the time-rounded stones.  He could still remember the fresh morning
breeze ruffling his shirt and the scent of newly mown timothy in the nearby
field with its sweet, yet pungent tang.

Reluctantly he picked up his laptop,
postponing once again dwelling on his solitary personal life, thus deferring a
confrontation with his inner barrenness.  For now his focus had to be on
the child trafficking case.   He preferred to pursue one active case
at a time and go after it with single-minded intensity, even though he was
skilled at juggling multiple cases.  For the next few weeks this critical
humanitarian case would be their primary focus.  He had started some
agents in the D. C. office examining email traffic in and out of Sofia, as well
as pursuing more information about the company identified in the bank
transfers.  They would work through the weekend, updating him on progress
a couple of times each day.

Although Moll was looking exhausted
from his night at the office, he was busily checking emails.  He glanced
up from his laptop.  "Say Chief, how did you get into
technology?  I mean it’s like unusual for someone your age."

Steve raised an eyebrow at him. 
Things were so different for Moll's generation and all the ones after him,
where technology wove itself into their day-to-day activities.  "My
Dad enrolled me in a special summer program sponsored by IBM.  When I was
eight years old, I developed my first computer program, which was some
rudimentary batch job written in an early version of FORTRAN."

"That would be like the early ‘
60s
, right?  Man, how did you do that?  Did they
even have dumb terminals back then?”

Steve laughed and shook his
head.  "No, Stanford, I had to make my own punched cards on this
clunky machine with a keyboard and no screen, stack them up in order and
physically run them through an IBM 704.  Crude, huh?  The program
performed calculations and produced a result on a printed report.  Sounds
like no big deal today, but back then it was considered miraculous." 
His parents were so proud of their young son that they framed that report and
put it on the wall in their den.  He still had it stored away as a memory
of how his parents supported him.  Sadly they were long gone, dying about
ten years ago within a year of each other. 

"What was next?" asked Moll,
clearly intrigued by this bit of living history.

"My Dad was always seeking
special educational programs for me because he was convinced I was a computer
whiz."

"Wow, you were like the original
techno kid."

Steve said, "More like the Geek
of the Week."

Moll chuckled at the remark, closed
his laptop, cranked his seat back and closed his eyes, drifting off into a much
needed sleep.   He was a Californian with his undergrad degree in
mathematical theory from Stanford who carried a big student loan burden that he
was still working to pay off.  He was the creative thinker on Steve’s
team.  He brought lightness to their cases with his outlandish ideas and
talented ability to mimic others, yet he was perceptive, logical and
dedicated.  When Moll first worked for Steve, he had been disorganized and
looked like he lived a ramshackle life, judging by his wrinkled shirts and
rumpled suits, but after Steve gave a morning lecture on how neatness and
organization contributed to solving cases and to leaving a good impression on
the public, Moll changed both his work habits and his appearance, although he
lost none of his originality. 

Steve glanced over at London, aka
Brian, documenting their findings in Portland in that painstaking way he
had.  He was the analytical talent.  His research and investigative
work were always meticulous.  Like Mathew and Moll, his law degree was
from Harvard.  Before that he had spent a year at the London School of
Economics -- hence his nickname.   He was the scholarship fellow, having
made his way through by hard work and determination, as well as by his
likeable, upbeat personality.

Mathew, now making his way back to
D.C. from Mexico, was the strongest performer of the three senior agents,
although each one was intelligent and talented.  Mathew had brought the
other two agents with him on the first case he was on with Steve.  Even
though Steve knew that Mathew was independently wealthy, he appeared only to
live on what he made as an agent.  He could be persnickety, but never
snobbish.  Over the years, Steve had worked the most with him and Mathew
had become like a son to him.

In combination, they were the three
best agents Steve had on his teams at the FBI and he always went out of his way
to work with the best agents he could.  Even though he was at the senior
executive level, he functioned as a field agent and he attributed his success
to the quality of his team members.  He had worked with agents from all
different backgrounds and out of universities and colleges across the United
States.  All he cared about were their abilities, their commitment to the
Bureau and the way they worked on a team.

Steve pulled his mind back to the
child trafficking case.  He wanted to bring the case to conclusion rapidly
and stop this perverse ring of kidnapping and abuse.  The tragic reality
of children sold into sexual slavery affected him more deeply than any other
case had.   Getting the court order to obtain data from Ivy’s company
had been a chance initiative -- one that had paid off big time.  Some companies
would have stonewalled them, filed a brief disputing the FBI’s right to access
data in their custody or at least demanding more time.  It said a good
deal about her company that they were prepared to act quickly and do the right
thing.  More than that, it said a whole lot about Ivy Littleton. 

He was wrong to have baited her that
morning, but she was so damn attractive when she was riled.  Still in all,
it was typical of him that he had little idea of how to build a relationship
with a woman.  Casual sex he could handle, but how to actually relate was
something else.  Ivy was a woman to remember.  She had the nerve to
stand up to him and yet she would bend to a logical argument.  She struck
him as a woman of deep passions, a strong sense of justice and loyal commitments. 
She was fast on the uptake, intelligent and highly conversant
technically.  Her attraction was more than her lovely looks – her good
qualities shone through her whole being.  He thought about her hair which
was so full of life, streaked with silver and soft-looking despite its springy
buoyancy.   When he saw it twining around her shoulders the day
before, he wanted to bury his face in it. 

She was feisty or at least he brought
out that quality in her.  Even though her mercurial reactions worried him,
he needed a woman who would challenge him.  Ivy was a captivating
combination of logic, charm and courage.  He had known a number of career
women during his lifetime, but they had lost much of the freshness and
femininity that he saw this week in Ivy.   She had a certain intense
verve about her that even years of working had not dulled.

He would check in with her next week
to be sure the data and files were securely in the hands of their corporate
counsel.  That could mark the end of their FBI business relationship. 
During that call, he would try to assess whether she thought he was the
greatest jerk around or if he might stand a chance with her.  While she
was on a different coast and he was on the road most of the time, Ivy sparked
his interest.

***

  Mathew was glad to be the first
one in the D.C. office on Sunday morning.  He figured Steve was doing his
usual weekend morning routine -- work out and swim, an hour at the firing range
and then a long walk around the city.  That would put him in around 11. 
The rest of the team had worked late the night before and he figured they would
regroup around noon.

He needed time alone to think. 
He had taken a run at dawn because his thoughts had been jumping all over the
place.  Now he felt calmer.  His condo that morning seemed like one
more sterile place where he dropped his luggage.   Here at the
office, he felt more at home.  The J. Edgar Hoover Building had its own
sounds, noticeable now when it was quiet, like birds that settling into shrubs with
little rustles and creaks here and there.  He found it soothing.

Here he was almost forty and still
single.  Like Steve, he traveled and worked long hours – six or seven days
a week.  Would he ever find the time to share his life with a special
someone?  Was he doomed to muddle along, occasionally venturing out, then
retreating feeling disappointed, mismatched, or even downright
unadventurous?  How many years would he continue to ask himself these
questions before he gave up?  He pulled his thoughts back -- never would
he give up his search for his true life-partner, whoever she may be.  Yet
how could he find her with the work schedule he had?  He was at an age
when he needed to infuse his search with a sense of urgency. 

Sitting alone there in his office,
Mathew decided to think back over his more serious relationships and see if
there were any common reasons why they failed.  True to his nature, he
would take an analytical approach.  He pulled a pad of paper out of his
briefcase and wrote the names of the women he had dated down the side of the
page, planning to list the reasons the relationship had not worked out by each
one.  Even before he got started, failure bounced off the page at
him. 

He pushed back in his chair, thinking
about how to make the exercise feel more productive.  Instead of listing
why the relationships ended, he would examine how each relationship might have
succeeded and then decide if he would want to be that person.  The list of
women was depressingly short and not because the relationships had been very
long ones.  Six in all.  He had dated and or gone to bed with other
women, but those liaisons were casual.  Even that list wouldn’t have made
the total more than 20.  He realized that was not even two a year, for
chrissakes.  His life as a federal agent was full of work, not sex. 
On the other hand, a revolving door to bed was not what he wanted.  He
wanted love, a warm home and a connected family – three things his own boyhood
lacked.