The Utopia Experiment

49

James Whitfield snatched the phone off his nightstand and silenced it before glancing at his wife in bed next to him. She’d never slept particularly well and it was something that had gotten worse as she aged. Bad luck that she’d spent the last thirty-five years married to a man whose job never ended.

Instead of bolting awake and scowling at him by the glow of the alarm clock, she kept breathing in the same relaxed rhythm. She’d initially been reluctant to get the head studs but now told anyone who would listen that it was the smartest thing she’d ever done. Dresner’s Merge really was a miracle.

The encrypted text displayed in the phone’s window was typically brief and ambiguous: “At your convenience.”

Whitfield slipped on a bathrobe and navigated the dark hallway by memory, entering his small office and closing the door behind him. A gentle tap on his keyboard woke the computer and he put on a headset before bringing up a heavily secured link to the man who had contacted him.

“Sorry to bother you at this hour, sir.”

Unlike his wife, Whitfield had spent the night staring at the ceiling, running through endless — and pointless — worst-case scenarios relating to the Smith-Russell situation. If there was relevant information to be had, this would be a very welcome interruption.

“Do you have something on the helicopter, Captain?”

“Yes sir. If you hadn’t called in the surveillance planes, we would have lost it. And even so we were the beneficiaries of a lot of luck.”

“You were able to track it then?”

“We were. It landed on a vacant farm in West Virginia.”

“Owned by whom?”

“A maze of offshore corporations that I can almost guarantee you will lead nowhere.”

“A CIA safe house?”

“Not according to our sources, sir.”

Whitfield didn’t immediately respond. It wasn’t military intelligence and it wasn’t the Agency. Who else would have a property like this available for an army physician and a CIA operative normally stationed overseas?

“Go on, Captain.”

“The helicopter left the farm and landed in a clearing in the mountains, where it was met by a single four-wheel-drive vehicle. It was on the ground for a short period of time before it took off again and returned to the farmhouse.”

“What was the purpose of the flight to the mountains?”

“To unload cargo.”

“What cargo?”

“Our men. They were buried in extremely well-camouflaged sites. Two were shot and one died of a knife wound to the back of the neck. We’ve extracted their bodies and transported them to the crematorium.”

Whitfield took a deep breath and let it out slowly. When dedicated, talented men died in the field, it wasn’t their failure. It was a failure of leadership. In this case, his leadership.

“I assume provisions are being made for their families?”

“Yes sir. Through the normal charities.”

“Cover stories?”

“In process. There won’t be any problems.”

There won’t be any problems, Whitfield repeated in his mind. More and more, it seemed that’s all there were.

“What happened at the farmhouse in West Virginia?”

“Three people got out of the chopper and went inside. The helicopter returned just before dawn and picked up a single passenger. It flew to the end of a dirt road about a hundred and thirty miles southwest of DC. One man disembarked and got into a Yukon XL. We didn’t have capacity to follow both, so we chose the car.”

“And?”

“We got lucky. After about an hour, it went into a tunnel and a decoy came out. The surveillance plane picked up the heat signature of the colder engine or we’d have fallen for it. Ten minutes later the original vehicle continued on to DC. One man eventually got out and entered the Metro, where we lost him.”

“You lost him? How is that lucky?”

“We got a photo from an ATM camera as he was entering the station. We’ve cleaned it up, but the resolution and angle still aren’t ideal. It should be good enough for an ID and we’re working on that. I’m transmitting it to you now.”

“What about the farm?” Whitfield said as the photo decrypted pixel by pixel on his screen.

“Empty. Dense trees come right up to the south porch and we’re guessing that Russell and Smith went out on foot and got picked up somewhere.”

Whitfield turned and stared into the darkness. He was being outmaneuvered at every turn — a situation he was very much unaccustomed to. There were no excuses for this. With three men down, he had accomplished nothing but to expose himself.

“Sir? Has the file I sent come through?”

Whitfield redirected his gaze to the grainy photo of a man walking head-down through scattered pedestrian traffic. The collar of his suit was turned up, obscuring the lower part of his jaw, but there was still something familiar in the large forehead, the receding hairline, the long, slightly hunched stride.

“We’re estimating him at about five-ten or — eleven, sir. Probably in his early sixties, with…”

But Whitfield was no longer listening. A jolt of adrenaline surged through him and he reached a shaking hand out to eradicate all evidence of the photo from his hard drive.

“There’s no way to know what train he got on,” the captain continued. “We got the security camera footage but there was some unknown problem with the video. We’re trying to get something useful from it but—”

“You won’t be able to get anything useful,” Whitfield said.

“Sir?”

“I want you to listen to me very carefully, Captain. You are to permanently destroy all copies of this photo and all records of your investigation into the man in it.”

“I don’t understand, sir. I—”

“Then let me be perfectly clear. There is to be no evidence that any of this ever happened. You and everyone else involved are never to speak of it — or even think about it — again. Do you have any questions?”

“No sir. Your orders are clear.”

“Do it now, Captain.”

Whitfield severed the connection and wiped a hand across the perspiration forming on his upper lip.

Fred Klein.

It explained a great deal, but in the worst way possible. Of all the people in the world he could have found himself pitted against, Klein was one of the most dangerous. And, if he guessed correctly, also one of the best connected. While Whitfield’s own power base was quietly centered at the Pentagon, it was almost certain that Klein’s was currently occupying the Oval Office.