The Prisoner's Gold

7

Special Agent Rudy Callahan stared at his calendar and groaned.

It was a torturous routine that played out every morning when he reached his desk and several times throughout the course of the day. Like a prisoner scratching lines on a wall, he was obsessed with the length of his confinement. Only instead of a cell, Callahan was trapped in a windowless office at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building.

The previous August he had been doing what he loved most: chasing down leads on the streets of New York. Now he wondered if he would ever see that type of action again. He realized that his last assignment had ended poorly, but he also knew that he wasn’t to blame. Unfortunately, his superiors viewed the episode as a colossal failure and decided to make an example out of him and his partner, Special Agent Jason Koontz.

Seven months later, they were still paying the price.

All because of a single incident in Brooklyn.

While conducting surveillance on the waterfront estate of Vladimir Kozlov — a Russian criminal who ran a local syndicate known as the Brighton Beach Bratva — Callahan had gotten caught in the middle of a firefight. On one side were Kozlov’s guards. On the other, a team of highly skilled thieves who were trying to escape the mansion under a torrent of gunfire and a series of well-placed explosives. The skirmish had left several gunmen dead, even more wounded, and the neighborhood engulfed in flames. Yet, for some reason, the thieves had gone out of their way — even returning for him at one point during their escape — to make sure that Callahan was okay.

It didn’t make sense then, and it didn’t make sense now.

Not that he was complaining.

Though his superiors were thrilled that he had survived, they had been furious to learn that neither he nor his partner, who had been parked outside the mansion in a high-tech surveillance van that was able to detect a mouse fart from over a mile away, had recorded anything but static during the confrontation.

No thieves. No gunmen. No crimes of any kind.

Both men had sworn that the equipment had been functioning perfectly throughout the evening, and each was at a loss to explain what had happened. Their best guess was that someone had scrubbed the signals to cover the incident. Their bosses had laughed at the notion, claiming that it would have taken an elite hacker with inside knowledge of the FBI’s technology to access their surveillance feeds, much less alter them.

Little did they know, that was exactly what had happened.

Hector Garcia had worked his magic and erased everything.

Regardless of the cause, the result was inexcusable. For their efforts, or, more accurately, the lack thereof, Callahan and Koontz had been pulled from the streets for the last seven months. Assigned to a drab office in Federal Plaza, they were forced to watch old recordings of news from around the world, while writing tedious reports that explained how the events might be relevant to the FBI: a government agency that had no authority outside the United States.

It was the Bureau’s version of busy work.

And it was wearing Callahan down.

Even though his shift was just starting, he grabbed a black magic marker from his desk and drew a giant X through the seventeenth day of the month. Then he sat back and admired the string of identical markings that covered the previous blocks in March. ‘Two more months. Just two more months until I’m free.’

‘Talking to yourself again?’ Koontz asked from the office doorway. ‘My grandfather used to do that, too, right before we had him committed.’

Callahan defended himself. ‘I’m not senile. I just want this torture to end. Only two more months, then we can get the hell out of here.’

‘No,’ Koontz said, ‘in two more months we’re eligible to leave here. There’s no guarantee of anything. We might be stuck here for the rest of the year. Besides, there are a million other assignments that they could give us that don’t involve fieldwork. Given their take on things, they might send us back to the academy to teach the cadets how not to do surveillance.’

Callahan couldn’t bear the thought. ‘They wouldn’t do that … would they?’

‘I doubt it. They hate us a lot more than that.’

Callahan groaned and rubbed the back of his neck. His day was just starting, and the stress was already taking root in his shoulders. If he wasn’t careful, he would be incapacitated by a migraine before lunch.

‘Two more months,’ he mumbled again. ‘Just two more months.’

Koontz laughed as he tossed his jacket onto the floor in the corner of the room. Unlike his partner, he didn’t mind their current assignment. The Bureau’s ‘punishment’ allowed him to watch television for several hours a day, only now he was getting paid for it. ‘Speaking of our superiors, I shared an elevator with the bald, fat one this morning.’

‘You mean the Assistant Director in Charge?’

‘Yeah, that’s the prick. Anyway, he said he was so impressed with our recent reports that he was giving us an extra special case to work on today, one with — and I quote: “international significance”.’

Callahan hoped for the best. ‘Really?’

Koontz nodded. ‘Unfortunately, he was laughing when he said it, so you should probably temper your enthusiasm a little bit. On the bright side, at least he’s talking to me again. That has to mean something.’

‘Yeah, it means he doesn’t know that you call him “a bald, fat prick” behind his back.’

‘That’s nothing. You should hear what I say about you when you’re not around. It’s a lot worse than that.’

‘I can only imagine,’ Callahan said with a smile. ‘So, the suspense is killing me. What are we working on today? The Nazis invading Poland? Melting glaciers in the Arctic? Or is it something closer to home?’

‘Nope. Today’s assignment is the bombing in Alexandria.’

‘Egypt? You mean the incident from four months ago?’

‘Yep. That’s the one.’

Callahan cursed under his breath. All things considered, he would rather watch videos on global warming than media coverage of a terrorist attack. As someone who had survived 9/11, he certainly didn’t want to relive that nightmare by watching footage of a bombing that was far from the Bureau’s jurisdiction. Even if they found something in the video footage, they couldn’t take action. And it was an old bombing. Stale, as far as investigations went. Much of the damage had already been rebuilt. He’d seen a story about it in the Times.

‘You’ve got to be joking! They already know what happened over there. The block was blown to hell with Semtex. What else do they expect us to tell them?’

Koontz shrugged. ‘You’re preaching to the choir. It’s not like we can do anything about it anyway. If the CIA wants to know something about the bombing, let their trolls figure it out. Just because we’re the ones with Investigation in our name doesn’t mean we should do all the research.’

Despite their situation, Callahan laughed. He had been in the Bureau for over twenty years and had never heard that line. He’d be sure to use it the next time he was stonewalled by someone at the Agency — which happened way more often than it should. ‘Let’s be honest: it’s not like anyone actually reads our reports anyway.’

Koontz nodded. ‘I know I don’t.’