DAY FOUR
The Panic
5
Colonel Kurt Hale could barely make out the words through the sobbing in the phone, the hitches of his sister’s voice making her incoherent.
“Kathy, calm down. Take a deep breath. I can’t understand what you’re saying.”
He heard sniffling and looked at his watch. Running out of time.
“Kathy, listen, I have a meeting I have to be at in thirty minutes and it’s all the way across town. I’ll give you a call back when I’m done.”
The hitches stopped and he felt the heat through the phone. “Meeting? I’m talking about your niece. She could be lying in a ditch or dead. Jesus Christ, she loves you better than her own father, and you’re not even giving her the time of day.”
“Okay, okay, calm down. What’s he doing about it? Did you call him?”
He knew the answer before she even spoke. Kathy’s ex-husband, a Wall Street bond trader, was a philandering, narcissistic jerk. Kurt had always wanted to punch the smirk off his face, but it had taken Kathy five years to figure out his true stripes. Kathy now used him only to provide for her daughter, like paying for Kylie’s student exchange to England.
“That asshole just offered money. He can’t do anything anyway.”
“Kathy, neither can I.”
“Bullshit! You work for the CIA or something. You can find her. You’re the only person I know. Nobody else cares. Maybe you don’t either.”
He rolled his eyes up in frustration. He loved his sister dearly, but her views on how the world worked were distinctly different from his. She was a pacifist, to the point that it had taken seven long years before she’d even speak to him again after he’d joined the Army. When he started working in classified assignments, she naturally defaulted to thinking he was some Black Ops assassin and—even when he told her he was in a Special Forces unit—she believed it to be the CIA. She believed everything was the CIA. For twenty years he’d listened to her conspiracy theories, and, ironically, if he told her what he was doing now, all her fears would be realized.
He deflected the line of discussion, saying, “Kathy, look, it’s only been twenty-four hours. There’s probably a simple explanation. Maybe she’s just out partying. Shit, she’s grown up now. A college kid. You remember what that was like.”
“Kurt, that line of BS would work when we were her age, but not now. She’s got a cell phone, Instagram, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Lord knows how many other means of communication. All of them have been stagnant. Her cell phone goes straight to voice mail, and she’s not posted a thing when she usually does that four or five times a day.”
Which were the first words his sister had said that made Kurt pause. The first clear signal that this wasn’t a college drunken blackout.
Kathy spoke again, the rage gone, replaced by fear. “Kurt, I don’t know anyone else to call. She’s not important enough for anyone to care. She’s just another lost American. And she’s in trouble. I know it as a mother. You’ve got to help me. I have no one else.”
He said nothing for a moment, then: “Okay, Kathy. Send me an email with all of her information. Don’t forget all that social media stuff. Let me get this meeting over with and I’ll see what I can do.”
* * *
Driving across the Key Bridge, George Wolffe finally broke the silence. “Hey, you going to let me in on what’s going through that head? You thinking about those missing soldiers, or are you finally accepting what happened to Pike? Still time to change your mind on this brief.”
Interrupted from his trance, Kurt faked a grin and said, “No, nothing like that. Just some personal stuff.”
“Personal? Last I saw you had no life outside of this organization. You seeing someone? After my forty-two attempts at a setup? Marge is going to be pissed.”
This time Kurt grinned for real. Wolffe was the deputy commander of the Taskforce—Kurt Hale’s number two. Like Kurt, he’d basically torpedoed his career to create and help command Project Prometheus, the thrill of the mission much more attractive than the potential future rank. Unlike Kurt, he had a family to come home to, complete with a wife who took pity on the vaunted Taskforce Commander, trying to set him up with every middle-aged divorcée she could find.
Kurt said, “It’s not like that. It’s some trouble with my sister. Nothing like the trouble Pike is in.”
George continued in silence for a moment, weaving through the downtown DC traffic, then said, “You know, falling on your sword is so 1990s. The nobility of sticking to your convictions doesn’t fly anymore.”
Kurt said, “Tough shit. It flies in our organization. It’s what makes our organization what it is.”
“Kurt, I get the military code, but you don’t know this place like I do. That code is fine on the battlefield, when bullets are flying. This battlefield is all about what have you done for me lately.”
Unlike Kurt—who’d grown up in special-mission units in the Department of Defense—George was CIA. As such, he had lived through quite a few purges and witch hunts, all looking to hang good men for a petty political edge.
George turned from the wheel and caught Kurt’s eye. “This isn’t going anywhere. All you’ll do is cause a lack of trust in your judgment. You defend Pike and they’re going to think you agree with what he did. Agree that ignoring their orders is okay. Which will cause them to question you on everything you bring forward. Think about that.”
Kurt reflected a moment, then said, “Trust is the cornerstone of our organization. Faith is how we operate. Faith that the Operator will do the right thing. Pike was the man on the ground. We were a thousand miles away. He ignored Oversight Council orders and made a call. It ended up being correct. He saved tens of thousands of lives at great risk to himself. I will not destroy him because a bunch of political animals now find it expedient.”
“Kurt, he went on the warpath over Decoy’s death. He lucked into the thread of the WMD by hunting the Russians. He wanted to kill those men, and he did. You have to see that. He cannot be controlled. Even you couldn’t control him.”
“He didn’t luck into shit.”
“What’s that mean?”
Kurt looked at his trusted friend and said what he thought would never be uttered. “I let him off the chain.”
“What? Are you saying you gave him permission?”
Kurt sagged in the seat and said, “No. Not in so many words. But I knew what he would do, and I didn’t stop him. He would have listened to me. I let him go. Hell, I gave him assets to do so.”
“Jesus. Kurt, you can’t say that. That is not a defense. That will destroy the Taskforce.”
Kurt smiled. “Calm down. I never thought I’d say those words out loud, and I’m certainly not going to tell the Council. I’m not even sure Pike realizes how I felt. Look, the Oversight Council is a necessary thing to keep us in check, but he’s what’s right in our organization. And I’ll defend what’s right.”