I WAS SITUATED IN the forest that came to a point between three high walls protecting the vice president’s home at the Naval Observatory, the Danish embassy, and that of New Zealand, holding my pistol, and steadying my breathing when a General George Patton quote unexpectedly floated through my mind: “Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.”
I had put a few things together on my trek through the woods. I always operated on two levels, at a minimum. First, of course, was the basic survival required to stay alive in order to be effective. Second, regardless of when I had seen, read, or heard a piece of information, there was a part of my mind that was constantly synthesizing the nuggets like some artificial intelligence algorithm.
Poet George Santayana had originally penned the oft-misquoted maxim: those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.
My belief system up until Melissa’s death had generally been to look at past success and execute some facsimile of what others did to succeed while of course critically analyzing mistakes made and learning from them. The human mind is fascinated by failure and the salacious acts of others. No doubt, others want to be successful, powerful, and rich, but very few are able to piece everything together to prevent failure while achieving success. A large part of success was preventing failure, while also having a clear vision of your desired solution in your mind.
I had been so focused on haranguing myself for fifteen months about missing Melissa’s last few moments that I overlooked the most important aspect of what she wanted to leave me. Not only had I not been there physically, I had been so absorbed with guilt that it clouded the very thing she wanted me to understand and execute. I was focused on the failure, not the success.
We had always been a team. She had always helped with the big decisions. Here I was self-flagellating and running on fumes in a stolen trench coat and beanie while carrying stolen weapons and phones as I eyed two men charging in my direction amid the sounds of music and laughter floating over the New Zealand embassy’s protective wall.
And a few more cylinders clicked into place.
I had read everything about Project MKUltra run by the CIA and Sidney Gottlieb. It had been an utter failure. They had tried everything and declared the decades-long hunt a failure. It had included hiring Nazi and Japanese war criminals to run labs in Germany and Japan, as well as opening experimentation centers at hospitals around the country, including Walter Reed—where Melissa had been treated.
The locus of activity for Gottlieb’s ghouls had been what was called Camp Detrick at the time and later became Fort Detrick, where the U.S. Army Chemical Corps would test new chemical weapons and defenses to known toxins.
The computer chip in the back of my brain was piecing together Melissa’s death, the raids in Heidelberg and Yokkaichi, and Parizad’s involvement. Whatever drug I had flowing through my system was ebbing. The optical nerve was sparking less, and I was gaining clarity on my thoughts. The logic was there. Or so I believed. The imagery on the mobile phone was a new layer to consider.
The drug first, then some kind of mind control through an iPhone?
Melissa had known something that she wasn’t supposed to. And there was a good possibility that my fellow members of West Point’s Long Gray Line, and perhaps even the president-elect, had something to do with her death.
Without the phones, though, the hallucinogenic form of Demon Rain was less effective. Without the techno-drug combination, there was little chance of a breakthrough. Was Parizad sophisticated enough to employ something as elaborate as a techno-drug? I had always considered him a brawler, not a technical fighter. I had figured mind control would be too esoteric for him. So why the wild-goose chase? To keep me preoccupied? If so, from what? To set me up? If so, for what?
Or was I wrong about Parizad? Had he evolved as a thinker and strategist? It was certainly possible.
Ever since the COVID-19 outbreak, part of my responsibilities as the commander of the counterterrorism task force involved smoking out not only the types of threats that the likes of bin Laden, al-Baghdadi, Soleimani, and Parizad could deliver to the homeland but also the increased likelihood of chemical and biological warfare, whether intentionally or passively delivered.
The unanswered questions were: What wasn’t I supposed to see, and what had necessitated killing Melissa?
My mind stormed. Short breaths escaped in misty clouds as my heart raced. I silently pushed my body deeper into the thick underbrush, wriggling my shoulders and arms against the loose dirt beneath me. The number of electronics scanning and probing these woods had probably already sterilized me. Thermal cameras, motion detectors, passive infrared indicators, and an assortment of other early-warning apparatus were monitoring my every move.
“Either a big animal or a person,” said one voice in a Kiwi lilt.
The brush broke ten feet from me on either side as they split up. I had used what little time I had to burrow farther into the deadfall. The warmth from the earth beneath a foot of leaves and branches welcomed me. The man on my left crunched the leaves on the forest floor beyond me and circled to his left, toward the Danish embassy’s rear wall. The man on my right circled to his right as they performed a typical cloverleaf security sweep, which sometimes left the middle uncovered if they didn’t get it right the first time. I breathed slowly and sucked in the earthy smell of decomposing leaves and dirt.
“Fuck it, it’s cold out here,” the guard on the left said as they circled back to the middle. “Probably a deer.”
I remained still for five minutes after the gate clanged against the metal support of the New Zealand embassy fence. Slowly pushing myself up to one knee, I backed away from the sensors and into a small ravine about forty meters deeper into the woods.
Having left Ben David’s phone gift in the Cadillac, I retrieved Donna’s phone and punched one six times as I had seen her do in the coffee shop. At the top was a text from “Douchebag,” whom I guessed to be Jim Tharp, her husband. I punched on the text and then the Call button.
Tharp answered, “Yeah, bitch, you recording this?”
“Hi, Jim, it’s Garrett Sinclair,” I said.
“What the fu—you boning her? Gotten over your dead wife?”
“I’ve talked to Donna and know what you’re doing. If you want to survive … politically, meet me at the parking lot on the west side of Fort Detrick.”
“Keep dreaming,” he said, but he didn’t hang up.
“I know about your plan. You tell me what you, Owens, and Estes know about Melissa’s death, and I’ll give you the flash drive that your dead wife gave me. Oh, and you’re looking good for the hit on Donna.”
The truth was that it wasn’t he who would be blamed for Donna’s murder. I was probably the number-one suspect. I had been the last one to be seen with her. Regardless, I hung up on him as he was in midsentence, responding with some mix of trash talk and disbelief I didn’t have time for. I had to figure out how to get to Frederick, Maryland. Tharp would have a Lincoln Town Car and a chase car with at least three or four security guys, and I had no transportation.
I backed into the forest, scanning in every direction. There was one piece of high ground, and I needed to insert Campbell’s SIM again and make a call. I retrieved my other phone and exchanged SIM cards, immediately producing two messages, one from a number I recognized as Campbell’s and one I didn’t recognize. I quickly blacked out the phone and looked away.
The clearing to my front was a lone area of high ground in the deep ravine, an aberration in what was otherwise a slash in the ground. I broke brush and stumbled through the rocky creek before climbing from the depths of the gulley and clawing my way to the military crest of the hill. I was still thirty meters beneath the peak of the terrain feature, which afforded me a view of flashlights swooping through the forest near the embassy. Dogs barked, hot on the scent. I slid around to the south side of the hill, planning my escape, but in the distance, blue police lights cut through the barren trees like a strobe. Both to the north and south were gated homes in elite northwest Washington, D.C.
The SIM card had not been in the phone long enough for Campbell’s Secret Service team to home in on me so quickly. The heightened security status due to the inauguration created a higher density of forces—good, bad, or indifferent—that could be leveraged against any possible threat.
Men in tactical vests with rifles bounced through the creek, tugged forward by large German shepherds tight on leashes, clawing through the deadfall. I was in the middle of Dumbarton Oaks Park, a rare rectangular two-hundred-acre stretch of land in Washington, D.C., with police closing in on my position.
I considered evading to either side where the gates and walls were high, but by this point, it wasn’t obvious I had the angle to beat them to the wall, and if I did win that particular race, I had no good intelligence on what was on the other side.
The dogs barked louder, sensing my proximity. I crawled to the top of the hill, a barren piece of land no more than twenty meters in width. Trails crisscrossed the plateau, and the detritus of high school romance littered the hilltop. Beer cans, condoms, cigarette butts, and spent lighters littered the trails as I stayed low and thought through my options.
Surrender? Fight? Flee?
Fleeing was looking remote, especially with dogs. The police would tie me to the Charlottesville and Arlington shootings and lock me up immediately. My protestations of a plot against the homeland would be dismissed as the rantings of someone who was not stable. The drug running through my body enhanced all my senses while at the same time clouding my judgment by making me more prone to emotion instead of reason.
Still, I was able to string together enough logic to understand that three West Point graduates were conspiring with Dariush Parizad and that Melissa’s death was necessary to their success.
And there were only fifteen hours left until the inauguration of a president who might or might not be complicit.
The dogs were barking in stereo now, beginning to claw up the base of the hill. I stood upright and looked at the phones. There were two voice mails I hadn’t listened to yet. One was probably Campbell trying to trick me into turning myself in, and the other might have been spam.
I glanced at the phone long enough to call the unknown number, and it went to an anonymous voice mail. I risked another glance and pressed on Campbell’s phone number. She answered on the second ring.
“Garrett!”
A man lunged at me from the west side. I rolled away and dropped the phone as I retrieved the knife I was carrying. There were too many homes in proximity to risk collateral damage with a gunshot. His momentum had made him tumble, so I kicked him in the gut before kneeling and landing a solid right cross on his cheek.
The beams of light were closer. The dogs were louder. The men were close enough for me to hear them talking.
As if this weren’t enough, the distant sound of helicopter blades popped in the distance, louder by the second. The airspace had to be locked down tightly, though airplanes were still etching along the sky above the Potomac River a mile away on their milk runs to Reagan National Airport.
I was surrounded on all sides with men and dogs clawing up the hill, and the aircraft above me was about to close the door on any possibility that I would learn what actually had happened to Melissa or be able to thwart an attack on the country.
The man at my feet lay still as I dropped my knife and raised my hands.