The Operative (19 page)

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Authors: Andrew Britton

BOOK: The Operative
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Trask continued smiling “You will wait at your hotel until we receive an update on your target.”
“Hotel, sir?”
“In New York,” he said. “There is no time to waste. Elisabeth has the details of your flight, your hotel, and the number of the taxicab that will be waiting for you. The driver’s name is Shrevnitz. He will have a weapon for you. There are clothes and cash already in your room. There will also be a Minotaur phone in a desk drawer. Please use that for any calls pertinent to the mission.”
“Yes, sir,” Muloni said. She turned and retrieved her telephone. When she turned back, Trask was already at the door.
“Have a safe and successful trip,” he said.
“Thank you,” she replied to his back.
Robinson eased in as Trask strode out.
Something dangerous indeed,
she thought. But then, people didn’t achieve what he had by being sweet and yielding.
Still, it was her life that was at risk. And whether he liked it or not, she might need to contact Reed Bishop.
 
Trask went to his study, which was at the far end of a long corridor. His footsteps fell lightly, briskly on the cherrywood floor. On the walls of the corridor were historical documents signed by each of the fifty-six men who signed the Declaration of Independence, a collection that ranged from a ship’s multi-language passport signed by John Adams to a receipt for hay signed by Arthur Middleton. Trask often stood in contemplation here, going from name to name, considering how these men of diverse backgrounds overcame their differences to agree on a defiant statement of liberty; how they risked their lives and the well-being of their families to turn a vision, an idea, into a reality.
That was how Jacob Trask had always lived his life, from the first aluminum spring trap he built as a young teenager to the fragmentation bullet he invented to help his sight-impaired grandfather bring down deer. That was what he was doing now.
He shut the heavy oak door and picked up the phone. He pressed a familiar speed-dial assignation.
“Yes, sir?” the voice on the other end answered.
“She’s on her way,” Trask told him. “Employ her as our lion if you can, as a lamb if it becomes necessary.”
“She was deferential?”
“Only to a point, as you said,” Trask told him. “She was prepared to challenge me on the mute order.”
“Just like in the terminal in Quebec,” the voice said. “A by-the-book team player ... until she’s not. We need to push her when she arrives.”
“Agreed. It
must
be this agent Bishop, then,” Trask said. “Are you certain you can get him?”
“Positive, Mr. Trask,” he said. “We’ve been watching him because he was involved in similar operations.”
“In what capacity?”
“Preventative, guarding against leaks on the inside,” the voice said. “We needed to get his eyes somewhere else while we made our move.”
“Why would the Bureau put a paper pusher on a field operation?” Trask asked.
“Because he is uniquely motivated for
this
job,” the voice said.
“In what way?”
The voice said, “His daughter was killed in Baltimore. The Bureau would assume, correctly, that he was not involved in the attack.”
The revelation about his daughter pinched. No suffering was greater than to see one’s child dead or dying or incapacitated. He had witnessed his own daughter in anguish. As a young girl, Kate had become increasingly withdrawn. The “highs” of childhood were smothered by her frequent tetchiness and insoluble feelings of hopelessness. She would lash out over insignificant, everyday actions, at least Trask thought they were, like the occasional grinding of her mother’s teeth during dinner or if she didn’t get an immediate response to a question. And Kate would somehow manage to sustain that seductive anger throughout the next few weeks, and sometimes into months.
At first, Trask assumed it was just his lack of experience in nurturing a little girl’s spirit, that perhaps as with his father, his stern comportment was better suited for rearing a boy. But as Kate developed and further removed herself from family, then friends, Trask noticed her issues begin to physically manifest themselves. She no longer had
oomph
throughout the day, and at night she had trouble sleeping, developing horrible, dark circles under her striking green eyes from staring through her angst all night. She would weep for hours and became increasingly paranoid that she was being analyzed and dissected by her parents. She stopped eating breakfast, then dinner, and lost alarming amounts of weight, when a girl her age should have begun blossoming. Trask and Eugenie could no longer ignore their daughter’s problems, nor could they continue to be argued away. Trask needed to be a concerned father and salvage his fragile daughter’s livelihood, to save her life
After many visits to the hospital for nutrient-infused intravenous therapy, among other recovery procedures, several doctors eventually concluded that she had an extreme case of hypomania: she was bipolar. Although relieved her condition wasn’t something terminal, but rather treatable, Trask couldn’t help but blame himself for her circumstances. Highs and lows were a fact of life he was familiar with, but he’d always had the tools to deal with those burdens, namely, projects and desires that kept him distracted from real life. Goals that kept his mind targeted on the bigger picture.
After many miserable months of trying to maintain Kate’s temperament through heavy medicating, and after her almost successful suicide attempt by overdosing on her pills, Trask was loosely referred by a friend to the radical Dr. Ayesha Gillani, who was curing patients with hypnotherapy, connecting new passageways through the tunnels in their conflicted minds, straightening the lines of their internal communication by gradually guiding them through a seemingly self-actuated choose-your-own-adventure-type scenario. Trask had his doubts, but he also had his hopes.
Dr. Gillani wasn’t too far removed from her Universität Heidelberg postgrad education at the time, a young woman in her early thirties whose light complexion, steel-blue eyes, and short dark hair, mixed with a spicy, almost cinnamon aroma, compounded her image into someone who could be trusted. She dressed professionally, wore very little makeup, no earrings or jewelry, apart from a classic Chanel watch. Simple and well manicured. And after only a few intricate sessions with Dr. Gillani, Kate’s psychologically charged disposition had been virtually rewired. She had been cured. In his daughter’s eyes, at least, Trask was now a hero.
But Trask had caused misery in the sons and daughters of others. Even the most hardened tribal warlord, refusing to become an informant, would change his mind when his young daughter was forced to watch her pet goat being skinned alive. Trask had studied the videotape that had been made of that little girl’s face.
There
was the key to world peace. There was the inspiration for this undertaking. Not her agony, but the agony of the mothers and fathers of September 11, of the USS
Cole,
of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where IEDs were used against good-hearted soldiers who were only trying to help packs of ignorant, thankless savages and their equally corrupt spawn.
“Mr. Trask?”
“I’m here,” he said. “The loss of his daughter would suggest, Agent, that Mr. Bishop will be preoccupied.”
“Not this man, sir,” the voice assured him. “Not Reed Bishop. I had my eye on him before this. His wife died when he was in Mumbai, investigating an agent’s death. He stayed with the case, and the funeral had to be postponed.”
“Did he solve that case?”
“He did.”
“Then you’d better be very, very careful,” Trask warned.
“Of course, sir. The Yasmin angle will only strengthen our hand.”
“All right,” Trask said. “We’ll talk later.”
“Good afternoon, sir.”
Trask hung up. The world around him was silent, conducive to reflection. It was a dangerous tactic they had embraced in the run-up to the mission, but Trask enjoyed the feeling it gave him. He hadn’t had that sense of risk for a very long time. He looked at his desk, at the photos of his own family. His wife, Eugenie, whom he adored, and their daughter, Kate. He didn’t know if he respected Bishop for that or found him despicable.
Not that it mattered. What was most important now was the corridor outside his study door. The men who had risked so much. The names to which he hoped one day, in all humility, to add one more.
His own.
CHAPTER 12
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
R
eed Bishop was cold when he woke.
Cold and very hard of hearing.
His right cheek was on the cool cherrywood floor, his lips were dry, and his lungs were rasping. His body was ... naked, it felt like. His arms, legs, and back felt exposed.
And there was stuffing in his left ear. He moved his hand left, thinking to pull whatever was in there out, saw a cloud drift over.
What the hell?
he thought.
Where was he? More importantly, where was his daughter? They had just been looking at someone, an older woman and her husband, talking to them... .
“Laura?”
he said, though he wasn’t convinced he had spoken. It sounded more like a thought.
Still thinking of his daughter, he placed his palms against the floor, pushed, and was suddenly surrounded by a cloud.
Did I do that? How?
He raised his head, looked through the haze, didn’t see Laura to his left, didn’t see much of anything that looked familiar, only a jumble of debris. His neck went numb, and he let gravity pull his face down with a hard slap so he was staring across the floor again. With effort, he turned slowly to the right.
There was Laura,
he thought with relief.
It looked as though she was sleeping. But she was white, covered with what looked like confectioners’ sugar. And ...
What?
There was only half of her. The top half. He screamed. This time he was sure, because it punched through the thickness in his ears and caused his throat to shake and cleared his head so he could hear the sobs and wails of others. As the dust thinned, he saw them, and more debris, and bodies and parts of bodies and a glaze of blood across everything, which ridiculously reminded him of raspberry drizzle, except for the blood that had pooled around Laura, where her legs used to be... .
 
That was the last thing Bishop remembered until he was sitting in a metal chair in some other room, being examined by a medic.
He was no longer so cold. And he could hear.
“Mr. Bishop, do you have any pain?”
Bishop turned tear-blurred eyes toward the speaker. It was a young woman. She was wearing a look of grave concern. He wondered how she knew his name, until he saw her eyes looking at his chest and he remembered the name tag. He looked down. It hung incongruously from a piece of lapel on the remnants of the dinner jacket he still had on. An FBI-issue terry-cloth wrap had been thrown around his shoulders.
“Do you understand me?” the woman asked.
He nodded. “No pain,” he said.
“I’m going to leave you here,” she said. “You have a few cuts and burns but—”
“What happened?” he asked stupidly.
“An explosion,” she said. “If you’ll wait here, I’m going to take care of someone else.”
“I’ll wait,” he said. His eyes dropped to the floor. A dusty tile floor. There were planters nearby. He saw dark shops beyond. He had been through here earlier in the day, walking toward the ballroom with ...
“Oh, Christ!” he cried. He tried to stand, dropped as his legs refused to cooperate, and sat, looking around.
He didn’t remember the explosion, but he remembered the moments before it. He and Laura were sitting at their table, almost dead center in the big hall. They were talking pleasantly to people they didn’t know, a couple who seemed enchanted with Laura, and waiting for Julie to step to the podium. Then the world went red and he felt as if he were flying.
He woke, briefly.
Bishop’s thoughts drifted backward into waves of elapsed memories, of the times his daughter needed him. To be there. To show up. He summoned up the first words she’d been able to sound out for herself, during a short family trip to Florida when she was five, written on a bus window.
E-mer-gen-cy. Emergency exit.
He could still see her proud smile, her darling little legs cheerily kicking at opposite tempos, unable to reach the floor or the seat in front of her. Searching through the fog, he remembered the times he pretended to rise from the dead during her school’s haunted hayride nights. Despite the thick, gnarled makeup he wore, she could always tell when it was her father clawing at the side of the wagon. And despite the multitude of shrill, shrieking children, he could always single out his daughter’s excited squeal. He always made her the lucky victim, the most special rider of the night.
But he struggled to retain the thought of her face as it was then, as her present, more familiar features took hold of his delusional imagination.
Laura was glowing, her head turned slightly away from him, forward. Her light summer dress swaying proudly like a new flag, her hair flowing as if it were a tropical shore. He followed her as she slowly ran, silently along the slate pathway leading to their home, home toward her mother. Her mother. His wife. His late wife. She had been the embodiment of his future, of his daughter’s future. His departed companion was the eternal bond between them, the rope connecting the climber to the cliff. And when that was detached, Bishop had to become Laura’s security. His daughter’s guide, her unconditional friend, her devoted supporter. Her father.
Bishop saw himself stop short only paces away from them. His family. The only links to what he could call real life. Laura embraced her mother like they were seeing each other for the last time, like only children know how to hold, except it was Bishop who couldn’t stay there, who didn’t feel right, and then she looked at her father as if to say, “Thank you.”
He
had
been there for her. Whenever he could be, in whatever shape the world had left him in. With whatever love he had protected for her inside his heart. It was always there. And always would be. And no one was ever going to remove that from him.
And now ...
He looked for his wristwatch, saw that the pressure he felt there was his bandaged forearm. He had neither a wristwatch nor a shirtsleeve. He let the arm drop, then raised his hand in order to cry into it. He wasn’t sure exactly why he was crying. But then a functioning part of his mind began putting it together. The medic had said there was an explosion of some kind. He had been knocked over and out, injured. His daughter ...
“Dear God ...”
He had an overpowering urge to see her, to hold her, but his body was trembling. Someone, one of the medics, saw him and came over to him, decided that he was not all right and that he needed to go to the hospital. He let himself be moved, lifted, wheeled for what seemed an interminable time. He was dropping, wheeled again. There were sights, shapes, sounds, but all he could see was his daughter’s destroyed body lying next to him, her pale flesh so still.
He was crying again, shaking, and then there was a pinch in his arm and it was over.

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