The Ghost War

“Jenny, I’m sorry. I know I said I wouldn‘t, but I really needed it tonight.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Up 95, toward Baltimore.”

“How fast?”

“I don’t know, Seventy, seventy-five miles an hour. Nothing I can’t handle.”

“John. Please. Shafer’s had a helicopter on you the last couple weeks.” Ellis Shafer, their boss at the agency.

“Shafer what?” So that’s who’d been watching him tonight. “Did Duto put him up to it?”

“Haven’t you figured out yet that Vinny Duto couldn’t care less about you, John? Shafer did it because I asked him to. He said they clocked you at a hundred ten. I wasn’t going to tell you, but that’s why I asked you to stop.”

“Jenny—” He guessed he wouldn’t be talking to Duto after all. A small consolation.

“I swear, John, I wish you were out drinking, screwing somebody else.” Her voice broke. “Anything but this. Every time you leave I think you’re not coming back.” He sat beside her on the bed and put his hand on her hip, but she pulled away. “Do you even care if you live or die, John?”

“Of course.” Wells tried to ignore the fact that he’d asked himself the same question a few minutes before, with a less certain answer.

“Then why don’t you act like it?” She searched his face with her fierce blue eyes. He looked away first, down to her breasts, their tops striated with tiny white stretch marks. Her milky white thighs. And the scar above the knee where the bullet had hit.

“Sometimes I forget how beautiful you are,” he said.

He heard a police siren whistling to the northeast, one of the precincts of Washington that hadn’t gentrified. The siren wasn’t as close as it sounded, he knew. Wells had spent a decade away from America, living undercover as an al Qaeda guerrilla, slowly ingratiating himself with the group. He’d picked up more than a few survival tricks along the way, including the knowledge that gunshots and sirens carried much farther at night than during the day. Just another bit of wisdom that no longer did him much good.

“Your hand,” she said. He looked down. His left hand was trembling on his jeans. She caressed it in hers until the shaking stopped.

“I don’t know what I’m doing anymore,” he said. For a while they were silent. She squeezed his hand and he found his voice again. “You know, I thought when I woke up in the hospital and saw you there that it would all be okay. That I was out on the other side. And now. ” In the distance a second siren rang out, then a third. Trouble in the night.

“Even Utah isn’t Utah,” Exley said. He looked at her questioningly. “When I was a kid, I used to love to ski. Before everything went bad with my family.” She slipped a hand around his shoulder. “Nothing scared me. Bumps, steeps, any of it. I didn’t want to hit puberty because I thought having a chest would mess up my balance. And it did.”

She arched her back, jokingly thrusting out her breasts, and despite his gloom Wells felt himself stir. He imagined her, a narrow boyish body cutting down the mountain, her ponytail tucked away. “They must have been surprised when they saw you were a girl.”

“Mainly we went to Tahoe. We did it on the cheap, stayed in motels, brought sandwiches to the mountain. The most fun I remember having as a kid. But I always wanted to go to Utah.” She ran a hand down his arm. “My dad didn’t want to. Said we didn’t have the money. But I pestered him and finally, when I was twelve, we flew to Salt Lake City. Me, my brother, my mom and dad. The whole happy family. My mom didn’t ski much, but she always came.”

“She was afraid to leave him alone,” Wells said. “Poor Exley.” He kissed her neck softly.

“Lots of people have alcoholic dads.”

Yeah, but you’re the one I love, he thought. And didn’t say, though he didn’t know quite why.

Outside the sirens faded. Wells walked to the window, looked at the agency’s guards in the Crown Victorias. He turned back to the bed. Exley had her legs folded under herself kittenishly now.

“You listening, John?”

He laid a hand on her knee.

“Anyway. It’s snowing when we get to Utah. Snows all night. The next morning we drive up to Alta. I’m so excited. The best skiing in the world. And we get there, we buy our tickets. We get on the lift. ”

He tried to slide his hand between her legs, but she squeezed them tight.

“We get to the top. And we ski down.”

“So you ski down? That’s the story? How was it?”

“Great. But, you know. It was skiing, like Tahoe. Just skiing. And I kept thinking that it was costing money we didn’t have, and I should have loved it, not just liked it. So somehow I was disappointed, even though I knew I shouldn’t be. I didn’t say anything. But my dad, he figured it out. Because at the end of the day, he said to me, ‘Even Utah isn’t Utah, huh?’” She paused, then continued. “There’s no magic bullet. Nobody in the world will blame you for feeling like hell, needing time to put yourself back together. But this — you’re not being fair to yourself. Or me.”

He knew she was right. But he wanted to ask her, how long until I don’t dream about tearing men apart, gutting them like fish? How long until I sleep eight hours at a stretch? Six? Four? Until I can talk about what I’ve seen without wanting to tear up a room?

“You’re not crazy, John,” she said. “You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to. People specialize in this stuff.”

“A shrink?”

“They’re professionals.” The desperation in her voice disturbed Wells more than anything she’d said, gave him a clue how hard he’d made her life.

“I’ll be okay. I just need to figure out what’s next. I promise.” He felt himself close up again. Good.

“Or me. You can talk to me if you want.”

“I will. But not now.” Instead he reached for her. She pushed him away, but just for a moment. And for a little while they thought only of each other.

3

THE NORTH KOREAN SHORELINE WAS JUST A MILE AWAY, but Beck hardly would have known if not for the blue line on the laptop screen that marked the coast. Thick clouds blotted out the stars, and even through his night-vision binoculars Beck saw no buildings, roads, or cars. No signs of life at all. Just an inky darkness stretching to eternity.

The Phantom crept in at ten knots, its twin engines rumbling quietly. Beck, Choe, and Kang had traveled 120 miles west, past the tip of the North Korean coast. Now they were swinging back east-northeast toward Point D. With any luck the Drafter, and not the North Korean army, would be waiting.

Beck’s Timex glowed in the night, its blue numbers telling him they were right on time: 2320. The trip had been quiet so far, their biggest excitement coming in Incheon harbor a few minutes after they left. Choe cut too close to a containership, and the Phantom hit the boat’s giant wake. It sprang out of the water like a forty-five- foot-long Jet-Ski and thudded down, sending Beck sprawling. He wasn’t sure, but he thought Choe had hit the wave on purpose, revenge for Beck’s offer of the cyanide pills.

They’d run at twenty knots most of the way, using the radar feed from the Hawkeye overhead to dodge the handful of ships along the coast. The dark sky had helped too. Beck had seen only two boats in the last hour, and neither had spotted the Phantom.

They closed on the coast, barely five hundred yards away now. Through his binoculars Beck saw a broken rock wall, its stones crumbling and scattered. But still no signs of life.

“Stop,” he said. The engines quieted and the boat rocked gently on the sea’s dull waves. The lights mounted in the pilothouse filled the cabin with a dim blue-black glow.