John Barber got off the plane at Ronald Reagan International Airport in Washington, DC, at nine o’clock at night and walked through the almost deserted terminal to the car rental agency.
After some negotiation, the clerk there ended up giving him a Chevy vehicle Barber had never heard of before called an Equinox, and twenty minutes later he drove it out from the airport’s depressing cement parking garage into lightly falling snow.
He found Route 120 and took it to 395 North. Ten minutes and twenty miles north from where he got on, he pulled over onto the shoulder in front of a marked police SUV with its lights spinning.
Or at least it looked like a police SUV. You’d have to squint and look twice to read where it said Pentagon Force Protection Agency beneath the blue stripe on its white door.
He got out of the Equinox and walked through the softly falling snow and pulled open the SUV’s rear door.
“You don’t have to do that,” John Barber’s old unit buddy, Eddie Navarro, said from behind the wheel.
Barber shut the door with a thump. Like Mike and himself, Ed had been a veteran of their Task Force Orange unit when it had sneaked into Pakistan and Iran.
Ed had the look of a dumb jock, but looks could be deceiving as he was an electrical engineer and a computer and technical genius. He had been their head computer tech. He was a section chief in the Pentagon’s satellite reconnaissance office now.
“Look around. It’s dead,” Ed said. “Sit up here. It’s colder than a well digger’s ass back there. Come up here where it’s warm.”
“Screw it, brother. I’m back here already. How’s Caroline?”
“Wouldn’t know. We’re separated,” Ed said with a shrug of his beefy shoulders.
Ed, never svelte, had packed on some more pounds since their glory days, Barber could see. He looked at the back of his head where a bald spot was growing.
“What? No!” Barber said. “That sucks, man.”
“Yeah, it’s a long story. It’s okay. I’ll figure it out. At least maybe.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah, I hear a lot of the old crew are taking a beating these days, aren’t we? Poor Mike. I loved that lead-balled bastard.”
They both turned as a speeding eighteen-wheeler went by in a rushing blaze of lights. It was close enough to shake the car.
“You can still love him, Ed. We just have to find him.”
“Okay, so here’s what I got for you. First off, you’re right. Those two GI Joe types you got off the hotel footage up in Alaska were operators.”
“Contractors?”
“What else is there these days?”
“Names? Addresses?”
“C’mon, John. You kidding? You ain’t going to get those. You’re lucky I was able to just get confirmation that they’re in the business. Freelance mercenary outfits very rarely kiss and tell.”
“C’mon, Ed. You’re a genius computer geek. You couldn’t hack into the likely firms?”
“A year ago you could, but the encryption is getting super crazy. So, no. Or not yet at least.”
“Shame.”
“But here’s what I do have,” he said as he passed back a stack of printouts.
Barber put on his phone’s flashlight and looked at the top sheet. There was a blown-up photo of a plane on it.
“A plane with markings that connect it to some kind of textbook CIA dummy company landed at the Juneau airport six hours before Mike and his kid. Then it took off the evening of the day Mike went missing.”
Barber peered down at the plane. Some kind of white jet with blue pinstriping. He remembered he and Mike passing off a prisoner onto a similar-looking jet some years back from the Bagram airport in Afghanistan. He wondered if it was the same one.
“So the Company took him? The CIA?”
Ed nodded.
“Definitely looks like one of their planes.”
Barber yawned. Out the window to the right through the snow he could see the Washington Monument. The red lights on the top of the giant obelisk looked like a pair of spider’s eyes.
He stared at them. He’d always hated that freaky Ancient Egyptian thing. What the hell did Ancient Egypt have to do with America or George Washington? he always wondered.
“That’s what Mike gets for working selflessly for them like a dog after deployments in two theaters of combat. That’s his pension? A bag over his head? Now that’s loyalty.”
“What is going on in this town at this juncture,” Ed said as he scratched at his bald spot, “is beyond my ability to comprehend.”
“That’s it?”
“No. Look at the other sheets.”
“What’s this other one?”
“A small airport in Oaxaca, Mexico, on the coast. I saw it last week. I couldn’t get a perfect read on the markings, but it looks like the same plane so I scoured all the feeds. A day after Mike was snatched I got a partial feed where it looks like a guy in a wheelchair being put on it.”
“That’s it! That’s Mike. Has to be! Where did it go then?”
“South. I was psyched because they left the transponder on. But then it went off as it crossed over the Colombian border. There were no other birds around to track it into Colombia. I lost it.”
“So, Mike’s in South America somewhere. That nails it down.”
“At least if it’s him, he’s still alive. Dead people go in body bags last time I checked, not wheelchairs.”
Barber looked out at the empty gray cold highway as he wondered about that. If that was actually a good thing at this point. If maybe it would be better if he were already dead.
Then he stopped thinking like a loser.
“I appreciate it, Ed. Sticking your neck out.”
“How old is Mike’s kid?” Ed said.
“Early twenties,” he said.
“I got one of those. A twenty-year-old daughter. Off at school. She never calls me ever since... Whatever. I miss her like crazy.”
“It’s actually Mike’s son’s birthday today,” Barber said.
“Happy birthday. Wow.”
A passing plow truck splattered slush against the cruiser’s door. They listened to the wipers flop back and forth in the silence.
“At least the weather’s picking up,” Ed said.
“Yeah,” Barber said as he grabbed the cold door handle. “At least we got that.”