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Annapolis, Maryland
Pete “Professor” Chapman blinked and let the memory slip away, bringing his attention fully into the present as James “Jimmy” Letson, walked right by him, showing not even a hint of recognition, and exited the hotel lobby. Professor, seated at a corner table in the continental breakfast dining room and pretending to read the morning edition of the Washington Post, watched him for a few seconds longer, before tucking the newspaper under one arm and rising to follow.
The face Professor remembered so well looked different now. Older, the cheeks fuller, rounder. Softened by too much junk food and booze, and not enough exercise. He supposed that was to be expected. They had all been young men back then, some not even old enough to drink legally.
That face—the face of the quitter—had been an anchor for him. A lifeline that had gotten him through what he thought would be the worst four days of his life.
The Navy called it BUD/S—Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training—phase one. Unofficially, it was just called Hell Week. It was the final exercise of the three-week introductory evolution of BUD/S in which candidates were subjected to a rigorous ordeal of physical exertion and sleep deprivation with just one goal: to identify those with the physical and mental toughness to become Navy SEALs. Four days in which candidates were put through the grinder—pushed to exhaustion, denied sleep, subjected to constant harassment. The attrition rate for the exercise was always high—typically in the neighborhood of eighty percent—and Professor’s class had been no different.
There was no secret to surviving Hell Week. The purpose of the exercise was to strip away the ego completely, revealing whatever lay underneath. You either had that toughness or you didn’t. Professor had found it that morning when he’d watched Jimmy Letson drop out. Over the course of the next three days, whenever he felt like he had nothing left to give, he would mutter, like a mantra, “I’m not Jimmy.”
After it was over, after he survived and advanced to the next phase of SEAL training, he had let all memory of that face slip away, and would have forgotten Jimmy completely if not for the fact that his platoon leader, Lt. Dane Maddock, had remained friends with Jimmy Letson.
Now, seeing that face again after nearly twenty-five years, Professor felt the old emotions rising unbidden.
Jimmy, the quitter.
He was surprised and a little dismayed at the vehemence he felt. Lots of guys washed out. For every sailor who earned his Budweiser—the distinctive eagle-trident-pistol badge of the SEALs—there were four or more hopefuls who rang the bell during Hell Week. They weren’t inherently weak or flawed. Every single one of them was still among that brave minority who had taken an oath to defend America. It was profoundly unfair to call any of them quitters, and in truth, Professor never had.
Except for Jimmy.
Twenty-two hours earlier, when Tam Broderick gave him this assignment, the only context in which he thought of Jimmy was as Dane’s friend. The reporter. The researcher. The hacker.
After washing out of BUDS, Letson had taken an assignment with Navy public affairs, finishing his term of service as a Navy journalist, after which he had gone back to school to become a journalist, and had gone on to have a very successful career as an investigative reporter, thanks in no small part to his online prowess. A true child of the digital age, Jimmy Letson had been a computer hacker before there was even a word for it. A lifelong tech geek, he built his own hardware and wrote his own code. As far as Professor knew, Jimmy wasn’t a Black Hat, using his skills to defraud or sow the seeds of anarchy. Instead, he was a sort of cyber-muckraker and champion of the fifth estate, while sometimes moonlighting as a researcher for Dane Maddock, who was now a private citizen and a professional treasure hunter.
It was this latter association that had brought him once more into Professor’s orbit. Maddock and his crew had occasionally done some freelance work of their own for Tam Broderick as part of her task force dedicated to battling the quasi-religious far-right criminal conspiracy known as “the Dominion.” Jimmy Letson had not been a part of that arrangement—indeed, while they were aware of each other, to the best of Professor’s knowledge, Tam and Jimmy had never met, but nonetheless shared a deep mutual distrust.
Evidently, Tam’s distrust extended to maintaining surreptitious electronic surveillance on Jimmy, which was how she came to notice that something was very much amiss in Letson’s world. Without any warning, Jimmy Letson had vanished, disappearing both from his physical life and from his considerable online presence.
The disappearance was alarming enough to prompt Tam to pull Professor off his current long-term assignment, as bodyguard for archaeologist Jade Ihara, who just happened to be a former paramour of Dane Maddock. Professor had left her in Cuzco, Peru, where she was running down some kind of mystery related to an old occult manuscript, and embarked on the fourteen-hour flight to Washington D.C. where it had taken him all of four hours to locate Jimmy Letson, who was currently using the alias Ryan Duarte, and staying in a hotel in Annapolis, Maryland.
Letson went straight to his rental car—a red Hyundai Sonata—in the parking lot. Professor loitered near the hotel entrance waiting until Jimmy had pulled out onto the street, before hurrying to his own rental—a silver Toyota Prius—to take up the pursuit. He didn’t need to worry about losing Jimmy in traffic; he’d tagged the Sonata with an RFID tracking chip.
Professor had tracked Jimmy down without much difficulty, which frankly surprised him. Given the man’s reputation as a hacker-extraordinaire, he had expected Jimmy to do a much better job covering his tracks. It was enough to make Professor wonder if he wasn’t being played. Maybe Jimmy was on a fishing expedition, trying to lure him or someone like him into the open.
But the reporter-cum-hacker was exhibiting none of the tells of a seasoned professional; no casual glances to check for surveillance as he left the hotel, no sudden turns on the road to check for a tail. Jimmy drove like any other commuter, moving along with the flow of traffic for a couple miles before turning onto Maryland Route 178—Generals Highway—heading west. He continued on for several miles before merging onto the I-97, still heading west, but instead of following the Interstate north toward Baltimore, or turning south toward D.C. he kept going west.
Tam’s assumption was that Jimmy had stirred up some kind of hornet’s nest and gone into hiding. Professor wasn’t so sure. His sense was that Jimmy was neither running nor hiding, but chasing something. Or more likely someone. A government whistleblower, perhaps, someone living in the sprawling suburban hinterland surrounding the nation’s capital.
Perplexed, and more than a little alarmed, Professor sped up, closing with his quarry until only a couple cars separated them. As Jimmy continued down the freeway skirting the southern edge of Fort George Meade, Professor became even more certain, not only of his read on Jimmy’s general intention but also the reporter’s current destination. He wasn’t at all surprised when the Sonata turned off at the Canine Road exit, just south of Annapolis Junction, and drove into the visitor’s parking lot at the entrance to the sprawling campus of the National Security Agency.
“What are you up to, Letson?” Professor muttered.