Thomas Knight arrived at the CIA’s ground-maintenance building just after six thirty in the morning. He was short, something under five ten, with a stocky build that had turned a little soft over the years. His eyes were wide and deep blue—his best feature, his wife, Stephanie, told him. The worst, the back of his head, where a bald spot was growing bigger every year.
This was his favorite time of the day, just before dawn, when everything was cool and peaceful. The campus always looked the prettiest to him at this hour. The lights of the OHB in the distance—American’s bastion against the real world—safe and secure, reassuring.
He parked around the side, unlocked the service door, and powered up the three garage doors, behind which were the riding mowers, tree-trimmer buckets, and other grounds equipment.
He lit a cigarette and then brought the Starbucks he’d picked up on the way in from Garrett Park, across the river, to the open door, where he breathed deeply of the woodland scents.
He was wearing his usual white coveralls, the CIA’s logo on the breast pocket, totally spotless. How his wife got the grass and mud stains out was the big mystery to the crew.
“She’s a magician,” one of the guys had said.
Knight had to smile, thinking about it. No, that had been Joseph, but he was dead now, like Walt and Istvan. And maybe the others, because none of them had stayed in contact once the op was finished and they’d been debriefed.
Larry Coffin had suggested they go deep and never make contact with one another.
They’d met at a McDonald’s in Williamsburg just a few miles from the front gate at Camp Peary—the Farm. Even Alex had shown up, and she’d told them she’d never eaten at a McDonald’s in her life.
“Yeah, right,” Fabry said. “Even in Paris, on the Champs-Élysées, there is a McDonald’s where you may have le hamburger and a glass of wine. And you have been to Paris.”
“Oui, but lunch at Le Jules Verne,” she’d said. It was the restaurant on the first level of the Eiffel Tower.
They’d all laughed, but the tension had run high that day, because once they left the restaurant, they would be on the run. And there was no telling how long it would be, if ever, before they could resurface.
“Hide the thimble,” Carnes had said. It was the children’s game in which a thimble used for sewing something by hand was placed out in the open when all the contestants were out of the room. When they came in, they were supposed to find it. But it was a frustrating game, because even though the tiny thimble—it was small enough to fit over the tip of someone’s thumb—was in plain sight, almost everyone had a hard time seeing it.
Carnes was going to hide somewhere in plain sight, under the theory that if George were looking for them, he’d look deep, not on the surface.
But that hadn’t worked.
Someone was coming, as he’d known they would ever since they’d gotten back from Iraq and George wasn’t with them. The fact that no one ever mentioned the man’s name or his absence had been the clincher.
“Let sleeping dogs lie,” the Magician had cautioned. “But go deep, at least for the time being.”
The others had disappeared, except for Walter and Istvan, who, like him, had come back to the CIA, but under new identities. Nothing whatsoever connected them to their careers as NOCs, and especially not to Alpha Seven. Even their fingerprints, blood types, and DNA on record with the Company were false.
They’d learned to blend in—or at least they’d learned to enhance the skills of something they’d been doing most of their lives. The one thing they had in common was the ability to lie so convincingly that most of the time they believed it themselves.
Knight was a kid from Des Moines who’d been a dreamer all his life. He lived in books, and at times he played the roles of his heroes. Don Quixote had been his hands-down all-time favorite, for reasons even he couldn’t say. But one of the guys—or maybe it was Alex, on one of their soul-searching evenings after they’d had sex—had found out about his near obsession and then came up with his operational handle. He’d never objected.
When he finished his cigarette, he went inside and started the wide-swath riding mower he was to use for this morning’s assignment. He was working the fringe on both sides of the driveway up from the main gate to the OHB, and after lunch he and Karl Foreman would be working the slope from the rear of the OHB down to the woods, past and around the dome.
Mindless work, but satisfying for all of that, because until two days ago he’d begun to relax, begun to actually take a deep breath from time to time.
Before he got up on the seat, he pulled out his 9-mm Beretta 92F pistol and checked the load. No crazy son of a bitch—whether it was George, their control officer, or Alex, who Coffin never trusted—was going to get the better of him. Rumor was that Walt and Istvan had not only been murdered, but their bodies had been mutilated.
Crazy things had been done to the Kirkuk roustabouts, some of them not even Iraqis.
“We’re here to send them a message,” George had told them from day one.
And such a message they had sent that, when they got back, even their debriefers handled them with respect—and maybe a little fear. Alpha Seven consisted of the most out-of-control operators in the entire national clandestine service.
Knight put the pistol back in the holster strapped to his chest under his coveralls, and headed out the door and down the gravel path to the driveway a quarter of a mile away.
The morning shift hadn’t started coming in yet, and the sun was just peeking over the horizon, the day still cool, the sky perfectly clear. Saturday he and Stephanie were thinking about driving down to Williamsburg for the day and maybe a night.
She was from St. Paul. “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s town,” as she liked to boast. As a kid, and still as a grown-up, she lived in her own literary fantasy world. It was one of the many reasons she and Knight had connected.
He’d chugged past the lower end of the parking lot and was turning onto the fringe beside the driveway when Foreman drove up in his Ford F-150, driver’s window down, and pulled over.
“What the hell in sweet Jesus are you doing out here already?” he demanded. He was from Oklahoma, and at fifty-five had done his twenty and was retiring in a year or so. He liked Knight, but then again he liked everybody.
“Mowing the grass. What the hell does it look like I’m doing, you dumb Okie?”
Foreman tilted his head back and laughed from the bottom of his boots. “Dumb Okie—I gotta remember that one.”
Knight had been calling him a dumb Okie since shortly after Knight had come to work here ten years ago.
“We’re supposed work in pairs,” Foreman said.
The order had come down two days ago after the murders.
“Whoever’s doing it wants the spooks, not us,” Knight said. “But if you’re so goddamned worried, get your ass in gear and come on down.”
Foreman laughed again. “Be down in a hog’s fart,” he said, and took off up the hill.
Whatever the hell that meant. Knight engaged the drive and started down the gently sloping hill, still a half hour or so before the early birds began showing up.
Barely one hundred yards down the hill, the engine began acting up, running rough, sputtering nearly to a stop, and then revving up as if the carburetor float were sticking.
Knight shut down the mowing blades, put the engine in neutral, locked the brakes, and dismounted, but before he could check the problem, the mower suddenly steadied out.
The equipment wasn’t exactly new, but it was in good shape. Their two mechanics made sure of it.
All of a sudden the engine revved up to its maximum rpm, the mower blades suddenly engaged, and the machine lurched backward.
Knight tried to step away, but his left foot caught under the traction wheel and he was pulled off balance, falling backward.
The base of the machine climbed up over his lower legs and then knees, the pain impossible. He pulled out his walkie-talkie and keyed the push-to-talk switch. “Karl, you copy?” he shouted.
But then the edge of the mower blades bit into his feet, and he screamed.
He tried to push the heavy mower away, but the machine kept coming, the incredible, impossible pain climbing up his thighs.
When the three-feet-in-diameter blades reached his abdomen, he passed out, and when they reached his face, mangling it, he was already dead. Still the mower continued up the hill, blood and gore splashing down the slope and across the trunks of the trees.