Things that have left permanent scars.
“Fine.” I roll my eyes over the shelves, artfully decorated with books and vases and record albums. Bentley always was a sucker for a good record. My attention zeros in on the gold SEAL trident resting in a glass case. It’s identical to the one stored in my safety-deposit box in Zurich.
He sighs, stooping down to access a false panel in one of the bookcases and opening it to uncover a safe. “Still a man of few words, I see.”
“Always the ones you need, though.”
He nods, more to himself. “Yes, that too.” Spinning the dial with deft accuracy, he pops open the door and pulls out a silver briefcase. It’s the kind of case I normally open at the start of an assignment, locked by a combination and waiting for me in a secure location, left by one of a few highly trusted Alliance employees who won’t ask questions and have no information to share. “We have a situation in San Francisco that needs sorting out. A search and recovery, and potential target elimination.”
It has always been so easy to talk to Bentley. We speak the same language.
He sets the case on the coffee table in front of me and pops the latches. I don’t even need to look to know that there’s a Beretta Px4 inside. It’s my model of choice, what I’m most comfortable with, and Bentley always ensures I have one. Next to it is a suppressor, a Gerber multi-tool, a fixed-blade knife, and a new burner phone. Beneath is a folded copy of the San Francisco Chronicle and an unmarked tan folder.
I don’t make a move for the folder just yet.
“There was a . . . complication recently,” Bentley begins, choosing his words carefully. I never get all the details, but I always get enough to do my job proficiently. “It involves an ex-employee of Alliance, giving explicit details about an assignment in Afghanistan.”
“What kind of assignment exactly?”
“Intelligence collection. Marine Corps captured an insurgent and allowed my guys to question him. It was highly successful, leading us to the capture of Adeeb Al-Naseer.”
A terrorist on the most-wanted list who bombed an office building in Seattle, killing almost a thousand people.
There’s only one reason that I could understand the U.S. forces handing him over, and it’s that they wanted to keep their hands clean of what needed to be done to make him talk. “But the general public doesn’t need to know the details behind the interrogation,” I surmise.
“I’m sure you’ve been following the news. You know how much heat Alliance has been under lately. The media has cost me millions in contacts, which are smaller and harder to get as it is. The war glory days are over. And if these lies that Royce was spewing get out . . . the Pentagon will hang someone for this, just to appease voters. It’ll be Alliance, and that isn’t good for anyone.”
I nod. Average Americans, driving along in their Chevrolets, filling their stomachs with burgers and their heads with Hollywood’s latest heist or action movie, have no fucking clue what it’s like to be in enemy territory, fighting a war to make sure it’s never brought to American soil again. Half of them are even arguing the need for the war over there to begin with.
So when a journalist latches onto bullshit propaganda about U.S. military and guys like Alliance’s contract workers doing unsavory things and blasts it out into the media, all those lefty liberals start screaming. While they enjoy their breakfast coffee under the blanket of safety we’ve given them. And then our government responds, because it has to. In the end, Bentley will suffer.