years as a head nurse at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, one of the best hospitals in the country. The smile faded from his face as he debated going forward with his next question. Finally, he went ahead and asked it.
“What about Jane Doe? Any luck on that front?”
“Not a thing. I’m starting to think we’ll never find her. Even if we did, it’s not like we could hand her over to the FBI. There just isn’t enough evidence to charge her with anything. They never found the gun, you know.”
Kealey nodded slowly. Eight months earlier, the newly appointed deputy director had narrowly survived an assassination attempt in Washington, D.C. The attack had taken place on the front step of his brownstone on General’s Row, just as he was stretching after his morning run. Harper had been facing away from his armed assailant when the first shot was fired. The .22-caliber round penetrated his lower back, then ricocheted off the third rib and up through the right lung. The second and third rounds had torn into his upper arm as he turned toward the shooter, and the fourth had punched a hole in his chest, missing his heart by less than an inch. The woman had been moving forward as she fired, and by the time the fourth round left the muzzle of her gun, she was less than 10 feet from her target. As she approached to fire the fatal shot, a D.C. Metro police cruiser had squealed to a halt on Q Street, lights flashing. The police officer’s arrival on the scene had been pure chance, nothing but luck, but it had saved the deputy director’s life. The woman fired at the officer as he stepped out of the vehicle, killing him instantly, but the distraction gave Julie Harper—who had been making coffee when the first shots were fired—the chance to open the door and pull her husband inside to safety. Unfortunately, the would-be assassin managed to escape in the ensuing chaos, even though the Metro Police Department was able to seal off the surrounding streets with astonishing speed. What followed was one of the largest manhunts in U.S. history, but despite the enormous resources it had thrown into the search, the government had yet to track her down. The CIA had looked harder and longer than anyone else, of course, and in time, they’d managed to dig up a few tenuous leads. “Jane Doe” had been involved with a former Special Forces soldier named William Vanderveen. In 1997, while on deployment in Syria, Vanderveen had made the decision to sell his skills to some of the world’s most dangerous terrorist organizations. From that point forward, he’d earned—through countless acts of cold-blooded murder—his status as one of the most wanted men in the world. The connection between Vanderveen and the would-be assassin was based on photographs taken in London by Britain’s Security Service, MI5. The men who took the shots were assigned to “A” branch, Section 4, the “Five”
unit tasked with domestic surveillance. The shots showed Vanderveen and the unknown woman walking side by side in the heart of the city, but despite the excellent image resolution, the photographs had proved useless. The Agency’s facial recognition software had failed to find a reliable match in the database. MI5, the French DGSE, and the Israeli Mossad had also come up empty, as had a number of other friendly intelligence services.
In other words, the woman was a black hole, a nonentity. Kealey knew how much it bothered Harper that she’d never been caught, but as he’d just said, there had been no progress on that front. This realization brought Kealey to his next point.
“John, it’s good to see you again, but what exactly are you doing here?”
The deputy director didn’t respond right away. Instead, he picked up his beer and swirled the contents thoughtfully.
“I’m surprised to hear you ask me that first,” he finally said. “I thought you might be wondering how I found you.” He looked up and studied the younger man. “You know, I have a few questions of my own. For instance, I’d like to know why you haven’t set foot on U.S. soil in two and a half months. I mean, I spend half that time looking for you, and when I finally catch up, I find you . . .” He trailed off and lifted his arms, as if to include the whole country. There was an unspoken question there, but Kealey wasn’t sure how to answer it. When he’d set out three months earlier, it was without a plan. Without a real idea of what he was looking for. But whatever it was, he’d found it on the alpine tundra and the vast, seemingly endless ice fields of Iceland. He’d found it in Alaska, Tanzania, Patagonia, and all the other places he’d seen in recent months. For lack of a better word, it was solitude, the kind of terrain where one could walk for days without hearing a sound other than the wind. It was what he had wanted at the time—what he still wanted, to a certain degree—and he couldn’t explain why. Naomi’s disappearance had played a role, but that was only part of it. Something else had instilled in him the desire to get away from it all, though he had yet to identify the secondary cause for his restless behavior.
“I’d also like to know where you picked up a French passport in the name of Joseph Briand,” Harper continued. He paused expectantly. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to volunteer the information.”
Kealey gave a wan smile, and that was answer enough.
“I didn’t think so. It’s funny, seeing how you don’t even speak French. A Saudi passport would have been far more—”
“Okay, so you speak a
“Just trying to keep my mind active.”
“Sounds like you’re ready to return to the ranks.”
“Not in this lifetime.” Kealey shook his head and looked away.
“And if that’s why you’re here, John, you’re wasting your time. I’m not interested. I’ve done my part.”
“We’ve already played this game, Ryan, on more occasions than I care to recall. You say the same thing every time, but when it comes down to the wire, you always—”
“I meant it when I said it before,” the younger man shot back.
“And I mean it now.” His face tightened suddenly, his dark eyes retreating to some hidden point in the past. “I just didn’t walk away when I should have. That was my biggest mistake. There was always something else that had to be done. Before it was Vanderveen, and at the time, it seemed like the right thing to do. But you know what it cost me to track him down, and then last year, with Naomi . . .”
Harper nodded slowly, his face assuming a somber expression. “I know what it cost you, Ryan, and I know what it cost Naomi.” He hesitated, then said, “You may not believe this, but I personally advised the president against bringing you into this matter. I told him everything you just said to me. I told him that you’ve done your part. That you wouldn’t be interested. He didn’t want to hear a word. After what you did in New York last year, he won’t have it any other way. As far as David Brenneman is concerned, you’re the first and only choice, at least when it comes to the current situation.”
“And you couldn’t say no to the president,” Kealey said sarcastically. “Is that it?” He didn’t bother asking what “the current situation”
was; simply put, he didn’t care to know.
“That’s part of it,” Harper conceded. “But there’s another reason you need to be involved, and once you hear me out, I think you’ll feel the same way.”
Kealey studied the older man for a long moment without speaking. Jonathan Harper was one of the smartest people he knew, but he could also be extremely manipulative. They had known each other for nearly a decade, ever since Harper had first “sheep-dipped”
him for an off-the-books assignment in Syria. “Sheep-dipping” was a term that referred to the temporary recruitment of active-duty soldiers for “black,” or deniable, operations. Usually, the CIA had a hand in the process, and Kealey’s first task was no exception. At the time he had been a captain in the U.S. Army’s 3rd Special Forces Group, and that assignment—the assassination of a senior Islamic militant had changed him forever, as well as putting him on the path to a new career.
Since then, he and Harper had become good friends, but the job always came first, and Kealey knew the other man wouldn’t hesitate to impose on their relationship. He had done it before, and Kealey had always been up to the task. He wanted to refuse this time and knew he would have been justified in doing so. But while the older man’s face was as implacable as ever, there was something in his tone that gave Kealey pause. He could tell there was more to the current situation than Harper was letting on, and that made the decision for him.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll hear what you have to say, but I’m not committing to anything. Let’s get that straight from the start.” Kealey lifted his glass and drained the contents. “What’s this about, anyway?”
Harper pushed a plain manila folder across the table, then rose and collected their empty glasses. “Read through that, and then we’ll talk.”
