Chronic fear

CHAPTER NINE

National Clandestine Service Officer B.H. Gundersson had spent all his life trying to make up for being born with the name “Byron.” Back before he was old enough to know it was a dorky name, he liked it. Then in the sixth grade, some wiseass kid had called him “Lord Byron,” and one of the teachers said it was the name of a Romantic poet, and the boys rode his case until high school, when he got big enough to crack a few skulls if necessary.

And he’d found it necessary.

To make matters worse, he kind of liked poetry, although he preferred Shelley to Byron. Even worse than that, he was a little chubby and squishy, and girls often thought he was gay. Maybe the boys, too, but he was big enough to keep their mouths shut. Then one day he’d made the mistake of wearing a gold T-shirt and a black leather jacket, and some girl had called him “Bumblebee,” and that drew a few laughs and caught on for a while.

Finally, he’d settled on “Bee,” even writing it on all his homework until that’s how it appeared in the football program, which his dad thought sounded tough and his mom said she could live with, though he’d always be Byron to her.

The kind of shit you think about when you’re sitting in a tree. Should’ve just gone with my middle name in the first place.

But Horace was even worse than Byron, as evidenced by the army captain at the Citadel who’d referred to him as “Horse,” a slightly better nickname than Bee and a little higher up the food chain.

Luckily, the CIA let him go by his initials and, as a core collector for the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, he was just as happy as B.H. Gundersson, although a couple of times they’d issued him false identities for some domestic work. But all the name games had been a waste of time, because Field Director Harding referred to him as “Gundy.”

While ostensibly the NCS was charged with coordinating information across all the different intelligence agencies in the post-9/11 U.S., it hadn’t taken Gundersson long to realize the creation of a new agency had simply snicked another wedge out of the pie. Occasionally the juice from one piece leaked over to another, but some top dog always had a fork jammed hard in the center of his particular slice.

As a patriotic American, he prayed that there would never again come a time when thousands of civilian lives depended on communication between people whose mouths were full of pie.

But it was a little ironic, in a Bruce Willis-movie kind of way, that the NCS was established for foreign intelligence yet spent a good deal of time snooping on its fellow agencies.

He looked through the binoculars again, sitting twenty feet up a young maple tree. His view wasn’t quite as interesting as it had been last night, when the couple had given him quite a show through the infrared binos, but it appeared they were finally stirring along with the birds around him.

Gundersson hadn’t spent the entire night in the tree. He was a targeting officer, not paramilitary. The killers were on covert missions overseas, handling assault weapons and explosives in locales where there weren’t many trees. People like him were usually chained to a desk, poring through e-mails, financial records, and questionable Google habits, but they also made good field workers because no one knew they were field workers.

Compared to dodging rockets in Islamabad, staking out a couple of reclusive hippies seemed like an easy gig.

The only thing that bothered Gundersson was why the CIA was wasting time on these guys when al-Qaeda was still Code Red and the next Timothy McVeigh was probably stopping by the feed store for a truckload of fertilizer at that very moment.

The guy, Roland Doyle, rolled out of bed first and went flopping toward the bathroom and out of Gundersson’s limited view. The woman peeled down the sheets and stretched, and he was disappointed to see her grab a robe from the floor. She stood and Gundersson thought she was headed after hubby, but instead she slipped into the robe and came right to the window.

Then she looked directly at him and he froze.

No way. I’m in camo and a hundred feet deep in the woods, and all this April foliage is thick enough to hide an army.

Then she glanced left and right before pulling the curtains closed.

Gundersson finally released a breath. They said sixth sense was a bunch of baloney, but in his experience, people often expressed discomfort when they were being observed, even if they didn’t quite understand why. Something just felt different.

But the house was quiet and still, and the pair was likely in the shower, rinsing off last night’s dirty play with a round of aquatics.

From his briefing, he’d learned that these two were involved in some sort of secret drug test. Harding, a Desert Storm vet, stressed that it hadn’t been a CIA drug test, like when they’d given hallucinogenic drugs to civilians in the MK-Ultra experiments during the Cold War. Harding made it clear he didn’t like that “wavy gravy shit,” and that Gundersson wasn’t to engage the targets. Somebody way up the chain, somebody so high that Harding could merely roll his eyes heavenward, ordered that the pair be monitored until further notice.

With the curtains drawn, Gundersson figured he was done for the day. The couple’s routine was to eat breakfast on the porch, feed the gaggle of hens they kept in an open pen behind the cabin, take a little walk along the creek, dig in the garden for maybe an hour, and then rest a little before lunch. After lunch, he’d log onto his computer and she’d get out the paints and brushes.

Gundersson zoomed in on the painting currently drying on the easel.

Sure looks like some drugs involved. Freaky stuff like that, it’s no wonder they kicked her out of the university. Couldn’t have her warping the minds of our next generation of grade-school teachers.

But he’d not observed any drug use of any kind, not even a bottle of cooking sherry. For crazed, anti-American hippies and possible threats to national security, they sure seemed docile.

He was just getting ready to climb down from the tree and head back to his camp on the edge of the national wilderness area when the couple came out on the porch.

Gundersson slowly lifted the binoculars again.

Shit.

Roland Doyle was armed, wearing nothing but boxer shorts, a black revolver dangling at his side. He clearly wasn’t trained with it, because he carried it like somebody in a movie. Wendy Leng hunched behind him in a bathrobe.

“Where did you see it?” Doyle asked, not bothering to lower his voice.

She pointed about thirty feet to Gundersson’s right.

Roland marched down the porch steps, across the narrow skirt of ragged grass, and into the forest. Leaves crunched and scuffed under his bare feet. Gundersson was armed but he didn’t dare move, although he gently let the binoculars rest by their strap against his chest.

Harding said Roland Doyle was “a nothing,” despite a few alcohol-related legal troubles in the past. The unspoken message was that Gundersson was on a babysitting errand and it was time to just shut up and follow orders. Wendy Leng was even cleaner, despite her subversive art. On the surface, they were just intellectual rebels, maybe a little too liberal for their own good but certainly not plotting to smuggle nuclear weapons.

But Gundersson was trained to believe nothing was as it appeared on the surface, and Harding’s directive of “Don’t ask questions” had certainly spawned a lot of questions.

Roland moved between the trees, not bothering to muffle his footsteps. He didn’t look up, either, which meant Gundersson hadn’t been spotted.

He was in Gundersson’s line of sight now and headed toward a small clearing. Roland raised the pistol in front of him and moved aside a birch sapling. Gundersson calculated how long it would take to draw his Glock from his shoulder holster. Being in such an awkward position might slow him and it would be hard to do so silently.

“Do you see it, honey?” Wendy called from the porch.

“No,” he said. “You sure it was out this way?”

“It ran from behind the pen straight down that little trail.”

It. She’s calling it an “it.” Which means it isn’t me.

Still, Gundersson remained tensed and ready for action. Roland had a furtive aspect about him, as if he was enjoying the hunt.

The shrubs to Roland’s right exploded with motion and Roland raised the pistol, squeezing off three shots in rapid succession. The sudden thunder boomed across the hills. Gundersson had the impression of a sleek, dark animal bounding away, but it was the bushy red tail that helped him identify it.

A fox?

The animal couldn’t have been more than ten feet from Roland, which reassured Gundersson that the guy was too liberal to practice his marksmanship. The fox, instead of bolting deeper into the woods, took a detour and splashed up the creek. Roland fired one more wild shot, sending a ricochet off a rock that zizzed through the woods. The fox slowed and trotted up the creek about twenty more feet, almost taunting its attacker, and then vanished in a thick tangle of laurels.

Roland gave chase for about fifty yards, lost from Gundersson’s view but traceable by the commotion. Roland apparently gave up at that point and returned to the clearing, where he brushed twigs and leaves from his feet.

You have to admire the little critter. Even in danger, it still takes the time to double back and trick out its scent so it can’t be followed.

That was probably a good lesson for federal intel agents as well. Gundersson wondered if he’d been diligent in covering his trek from the tree to his camp, as well as a couple of other reconnaissance points he’d established-a massive tumble of granite slabs on the south side of the cabin and a dense thicket of rhododendron near the chicken shed.

But he was more of a desk jockey than anything, a little out of shape, with curly, unkempt hair that didn’t fit the ramrod stereotype, and a freckled complexion. Nobody would mistake him for a secret agent of any kind, and someone spying him in the tree would have taken him for a redneck poacher. Hell, he’d barely even made it up the tree, skinning his elbow in the process.

He probably had been a little less careful than he would have been on a real assignment, checking up on an alleged KKK militant or scouting transfer students from the Middle East. And mistakes like that could get you killed. Mistakes like that were why the clandestine service was needed in the first place.

“Did you get it?” Wendy asked from the porch.

“No,” Roland called back, irritated.

Roland bent and stirred around in the leaves a little, plucking something from the ground where the fox had been. Still clutching the pistol, but relaxed now, he headed back to the cabin.

When he reached the porch, Gundersson raised the glasses. He could see the feathers in Roland’s hand as Wendy reached for them.

Fox must have been raiding the henhouse.

The couple went back inside the cabin. It was time for breakfast. Gundersson was hungry himself. Eggs sounded real good.

But he’d be eating out of a can instead.

He made his way down the tree and, taking a hint from the fox, he navigated a new route back to his camp so that he wouldn’t create a trail that Roland might follow.

Sly as a fox. I hope I’m quick enough to dodge four bullets when my time comes.