One Rough Man

since I didn’t want to say anything specific on an open phone line, but I finally managed to get him to meet us in the lobby. I gave him my description and hung up the phone.

Jennifer looked at me with a question.

“Someone’s coming down. We’ll see if it’s the right guy or not.”

Eventually, a young man came out of the elevator, dressed in chinos and a button-down shirt, looking like he would start to shave in a few years. He glanced nervously around the lobby, passing over me and focusing on Jennifer. He smiled at her, then continued to look around. Great. An idiot. I stood up and walked over to him.

“Looking for someone?”

He showed a spark of surprise, quickly covered up by bluster.

“I’m Eric. You apparently had some information you wanted to pass?”

“Yeah, can we go to your office?”

“No. Let’s go over to the couch and you can tell me what you have.”

I’d figured he’d do that and agreed. I was in a little bit of a quandary, since I didn’t know if this guy was really in the CIA, and knew there was no way he would admit to it, so I would either have to dive in headfirst, or walk away.

Eric pulled out a notebook and pen, turning to me to speak when he noticed Jennifer walk up. He went into a random diatribe about the weather. I relaxed. He’s a flunky, but he’s a spook. Nobody else would have flexed at the approach of a stranger.

I interrupted the soliloquy. “She’s with me. Don’t worry about her.”

He stopped talking, looking from me to Jennifer and back. I took the initiative, telling him why we’d come. As I went through the story, conveniently leaving out a majority of the death and destruction, I noticed that Eric kept stealing glances at Jennifer’s chest and had failed to write down a single thing. I stopped talking.

Eric, smiling yet again at Jennifer, finally felt the silence and turned back to me. I leaned into his personal space.

“Look. You had better start writing some of this stuff down. There’s going to be a cable coming out of this that I expect you to send. Understand?”

That flustered him. “Hold on a minute. You asked me to come down here, not the other way around. I’ll decide what we do with your information, not you. Let’s get that clear right now.”

My rage began to bubble up, catching me by surprise, an unwelcome enemy determined to show who still owned my soul. Jennifer put her hand on my arm, probably seeing the signs and trying to blunt the edge. It worked, at least a little. I no longer wanted to kill him, just hurt him.

“Give me your pen and paper.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m going to write your cable. I’m close to ripping off your head and shitting down your neck. To save us both the embarrassment, I’m going to tell you what to send.”

Eric handed me the pad and backed away. Jennifer glared at me, clearly upset at the way this was turning out.

I took the paper and wrote a one-paragraph note. At the end of the note, I wrote, “PrometheusPike.” Handing the pad back to Eric, I said, “Send that in a cable. I don’t care who you route it to, as long as you include the crypt at the bottom. Do you understand?”

Eric nodded, completely subdued. “Is there some way I can contact you here? If I need to?”

I thought for a second. “Yeah, get me a hotel with an embassy rate and you’ll know where we’re staying.”

“Okay, okay, I can do that. Give me a few minutes. I’ll be right back.”

Five minutes later, he returned with the confirmation number, the address to the hotel, and a little bit of his confidence back.

“Here’s where we send all of our TDY folks. It’s on my credit card right now. You need to put it on your card, or your cable’s going in the trash.”

I stared at him in silence until he began to falter, glancing over his shoulder at the Marine in Post One for help. He finally held out the address and confirmation number with a slight tremor. Jennifer shook her head and took the Post-it note, thanking him for his time. Then she turned without a word and began walking at a brisk pace out of the embassy.

Catching up to her outside, I said, “Well, that went better than expected. We very well might get a cable out, and as a bonus, we got a cut-rate hotel room.”

Jennifer turned so quickly I ran into her. “Do you have to be such an asshole to everyone? He was just trying to help. We’ll be lucky if he uses your note to blow his nose.”

She was as mad as I’d ever seen her, slightly trembling but looking me in the eye and daring me to bark back, waiting on the inevitable rage she knew I had.

Instead, my anger not only disappeared, as it had in the past, but it reversed. For some idiotic reason I wanted to calm her down. To make her smile. Jesus. I want her to like me. I was so conflicted I wasn’t sure what to do. I hadn’t given a shit about any person on earth since Heather, and that’s the way I had liked it. What the hell? Am I going crazy? Crazy or not, she had something that seemed to stop my slide into the abyss. Kept me human. Or at least reminded me of what human was. An innocence I wanted back.

“You’re right. I shouldn’t have done that. He pushed my buttons. I don’t want to be a prick, but it just happens sometimes. I’m working on it. Can we forget about it?”

She looked confused, then suspicious. “Well… okay.”

She waited a second, as if she expected a trick. When none came, her anger deflated a little bit. “Let’s just hope he does something with what we told him.”

I smiled, relieved. “He’ll send the cable. It’s too volatile not to send in this day and age. Easier to pass the responsibility to someone else.”

53

Eric returned to his office, still flustered by the encounter with Pike. On the one hand, he didn’t want to send the cable precisely because Pike had demanded he do so. Yeah, maybe I was a little distracted by Pike’s companion, but that’s no reason to act like such an asshole. On the other hand, if he did nothing and Pike’s wild story proved to be true, there would be hell to pay.

Today was one of the few times he could send a cable out on his own. Ordinarily, he just wrote the cables for release by the chief of station, but Belize had been without a chief for six months, and would probably be without one for the foreseeable future as the CIA pulled experienced hands to fill the gaps created by dealing with a substate threat that couldn’t be seen by satellites. With the deputy chief on leave, and Steve, the only other case officer, out doing what he was paid to do, he was now left alone at the wheel.

A year out of college, six months out of training, Eric had the requisite skills for his position of collating reports and sending cables but had little to no experience in the rough and tumble world of covert operations. He decided it would be better to send the cable and get scolded for clogging up the pipe than not send it and get hammered for missing a terrorist attack.

He typed up Pike’s paragraph, adding some of his own observations, and launched it out, including the Counterterrorism Center on the distro, along with the usual Latin American Affairs desks. He included the crypt that Pike had given him.

* * *

The cable traveled at the speed of the Internet, instantly residing in the in-boxes of the people he had put on the distro. Because of the crypt, it was rerouted to several select boxes as well.

Seconds later, alarms began to go off in some of the most powerful offices in Washington, D.C. Some had official titles; others were simply oak doors with no indication of what was behind them. The crypt that Pike had