A Knife Edge

ONE

I'd been sent on a mission. Apparently I was the only man for the job. The going was tough, but I made it through. The cab driver was from Senegal or Swaziland, or maybe from somewhere else entirely. Whatever, he had absolutely no idea where he was going in D.C. Eventually, he did find the place, the address of which was written on the slip of paper I'd given him, now clamped between his lips: a shop in the ‘burbs called Sea Breeze Aquarium that specialized in tropical fish. I bought the ones the Navy captain, my current commanding officer, had ordered for his tank, and composed an elegant resignation in my head on the return trip to the Pentagon.

“Your fish, Captain,” I said, holding up the plastic bag with Nemo and an identical twin swimming round in crazed circles.

“Ahh, you're back.” Captain Chip Schaeffer lifted his head and pulled his nose out of a file. He got up from behind his desk like he was starving and I was a delivery guy from Pizza Hut, and raced over to take the little orange fish into custody. “Good man,” he said, relieving me of the plastic water-filled bag. “I trust you got receipts for these, and the cab fares. You don't want to get the Government Accounting Office ticked off.”

“Sir, I quit,” I said eloquently.

He poured the live cartoon characters into the tank, where they immediately and wisely sought the darkest place they could find: beneath a sunken plastic sub being strangled by a giant plastic octopus. His back to me, Schaeffer said, “There you go, fellers, your new home. Your orders are in the folder on the table. You leave this afternoon.”

Who? Me, or the fish? I wasn't sure. Maybe the octopus was going somewhere. The captain couldn't have been speaking to me, could he? I'd done nothing for months except polish the vinyl of my chair with my butt. In between errands, that is. I was fed up with my “recovery.” In darker moments I wondered whether it was just Uncle Sam paying me back for all the waves I caused during the investigation into the death of General Abraham Scott, my last case. Maybe they were making sure I played nice and predictable by keeping me on the sidelines indefinitely.

Arlen Wayne, my ex-drinking partner, and Anna Masters, my current love interest and coinvestigator on the Scott case, both agreed that the relaxed pace of my new assignment was for my own good and there was nothing sinister about it. My country was just going easy on me. After all, they said, the Scott case had nearly killed me several times. And had indeed killed Anna, at least according to the newspapers. But, as usual, they'd gotten it wrong. Instead, Anna was in a coma. Once she'd pulled through, her recovery had been fast. Her age and fitness had had a lot to do with that, the doctors claimed, though she later said that it was because she wanted to have sex with me. I preferred her theory to the doctors'.

I, on the other hand, recovered slow. The bullet wounds and the broken ribs took their own sweet time to heal. I only started to get better once I began helping Anna through her recovery a couple of times a day. Within a couple of months, I was ready to reassume active duty of the more military kind.

That, as I said, was quite a few months ago. Major Anna Masters had long since returned to Ramstein Air Base, Germany. I'd moved, too, out of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, and across the Potomac to a suite at the Pentagon. My orders said I'd been transferred to the DoD's investigation arm, into the exclusive ranks of those supersecret sleuths who handle the cases too sensitive for ordinary mortals. I had, apparently, made The Team. Months later, what these people did was still a secret, at least to me.

Captain Chip Schaeffer, my boss these days, was Navy and getting near retirement. When I first heard that my new immediate superior was a captin, I thought maybe I'd been demoted, a captain being inferior to a major — my rank. But, in fact, a Navy captain is equal to an Air Force colonel. Confusing, I know, but the military likes it that way. It keeps the real enemy — civilians — guessing. Rumor had it that Schaeffer headed up some extra-special investigation arm. The Team within The Team. But, from what I could see, his job entailed reading volumes of DoD documents and picking out procedural errors. He told me that I was his backup, only I had no idea what correct DoD procedure was and so had absolutely no idea what I was backing up. The captain understood this, which was why he never gave me anything to check.

All this was running through my head, so I asked for clarification. “Me, Captain? Am I going someplace?”

“You think I'm talking to the fish, Cooper? I'm old, but I ain't that old.” He sprinkled food flakes into the tank.

“No, sir. I don't think you're old, sir. So what's it about?” I asked.

“First things first, Cooper. Your resignation is not accepted. As for what it's about, and I take it you mean the case, we don't know. That's why we're sending you. Basically, what we have is an American scientist eaten by a fish.”

Yuck? The picture of a man being attacked by a giant clown fish flashed into my mind. I was also a little puzzled. It sounded like this scientist had met his death through misadventure, and accidents — ones befalling American scientists or otherwise — usually fell within the jurisdiction of local law-enforcement agencies.

I was about to ask why the DoD was involving itself when Schaeffer said, “The scientist works — or I should say, worked — for a company doing some research for us.”

That explained it. Research funded by the Department of Defense was usually highly sensitive, on account of it mostly having something to do with killing people — in the defense of our nation, of course, so that made it OK. “What was he doing for us?” I asked.

“ Need-to-know basis, Cooper, and you don't. For that matter, neither do I, which is why I haven't been briefed on it either. There are, however, a few more details in the file, the one with your name on it, on my desk. Read it before you get on the plane.”

I'm getting on a plane? I swallowed hard. I don't like flying, which I know is weird coming from an Air Force officer, but I had reasonable grounds for the problem: I'd been shot out of the sky a couple of times during my tour in Afghanistan as a combat air controller. Lately, I'd been doing some work on that issue with an Air Force shrink. It seemed I was about to give it a test.

Schaeffer cooed, “Out you come, fellas… chow time.” One of the clown fish made a tentative break from the submarine, tempted by the flakes sinking through the water, but it turned and fled back to the safety of the sunken sub when something spooked it, most probably the vision magnified by the water of the captain's approaching lips formed into the shape of a cat's puckered anus. Or was it a kiss? I really needed to get the hell out of there.