The Shield of Darius Read online

  With his toe he tapped the power switch on the surge protector and listened to his laptop hum to life as he collapsed into a chair in front of it. At the machine’s request, he entered his finger prints, then a password combination of the upper case keyboard symbols for the last four digits of his old social security number, $&&#, and FAC02 for Forward Air Controller - 02. The computer’s hard drive was programmed to automatically bring up a basic DWAT spread sheet showing an alphabetical listing of names, home towns, and dates of disappearance. He drew deeply on the open beer as names and figures filled the screen. Pulling the list from its envelope, he unfolded the single sheet and held it against the screen to match dates.

  Lynn Ashford. Minneapolis. Disappeared Aug. 10. Falen glanced over at his application list. June 15. Two months between passport application and disappearance.

  James Cannon. Portland, OR. Disappeared December 17. Application October 15. Eight weeks between application and disappearance.

  Robert Carter. Cincinnati. Disappeared Jan. 2. Date of application, Oct. 14. Two and a half months.

  Marshall Chambers. New York. Disappeared April 22. Applied March 4. A month and a half.

  Falen began to ignore the names and simply check the elapsed time between date of application and disappearance. Two months. Six weeks. Three months. One month. He finished the list and ran through it again, just to be certain. Incredible! Every single DWAT, including people like Sager who traveled all the time, had disappeared while on a passport that had been active no more than three months! Sager’s old passport had actually expired after his re-application, but every last one of the DWATs had applied or renewed within three months of dropping out of sight.

  He leaned back and worked again at the open beer. If people were being recruited for some overseas thing for which they needed to vanish without raising too much suspicion, what were the odds that out of twenty-eight affluent, previously traveled Americans, all would need to renew passports before leaving? Slim to none. And if they’d been abducted – picked up by some group that was watching for affluent, cosmopolitan Americans? What were the odds then? Slim to none. Unless…. Falen leaned forward and stared at the dates again, then slapped his free hand against the table with such force that it toppled the rest of the open beer onto the floor.

  He swore under his breath and picked up the bottle, walked to the kitchen for a towel, and dropped it onto the spill while he returned to the screen.

  “Shit! Why didn’t I think to check this earlier?” Reaching across the desk to his left, he pulled a copy of the U.S. Government Index from a shelf beside the printer, thumbed through it until he found “Department of State,” and the paragraph describing offices listed under Consular Affairs. A simple chart showed the location and addresses of seventeen regional passport offices around the country. He glanced back at the map over the dresser, then down at the list. If these offices were points of identification for whoever was running this racket, either seventeen people were mixed up in it, or someone traveling from one office to another was gathering information. Or... they waited until the data all came together at a central location. It seemed a better bet that the information was being picked up after it reached the central passport office in Washington.

  He turned back a page, made a mental note of the Washington passport office address on 19th Street, and returned the unopened beer to the fridge. He called Fisher who answered on the second ring.

  “I need some information. Please run a check on people working at the Passport Office at 1111 19th Street who’d have ready access to new application information nationwide. I’m looking for someone who’s probably been there at least two years. He or she may have overseas connections, recent changes in income, personal travel abroad, that sort of thing. Maybe the person’s into something that would make them a target for blackmail. Affairs. Closet homosexual. Look for anything unusual.”

  “Do we have some connection between these disappearances and a government office?” Fisher asked.

  “All of these people who disappeared had new passport applications. Every single one of them. Even those who traveled a lot disappeared just after a renewal. It’s got to be more than coincidence.”

  There was a brief pause, then Fisher asked, “You don’t suppose the Government’s tied up in this somehow?”

  Falen was silent. Shit. Another possibility he hadn’t considered. He was slipping. “I sure as hell hope not. But the demographic patterns are very strange. They’re getting people from all over the country. Key big cities and people with money. They even seem to be disappearing according to some pattern of race and gender. You can check out the government angle better than I can.:”

  “We’ll call with your order when it’s ready,” Fisher said and hung up. Falen rescued the second beer and sat again in front of the tabled display of DWAT information.

  “I’m closing in on you, you little SOB’s,” he said smugly. He hoped to hell the government didn’t have its nose in this.

  TEN

  At a low, ranch-style home near Ashburn, Virginia, Bud “Fisher” Liljigren looked grimly down a complex bank of electronic equipment to his right. A plump, pleasant-faced woman was already encoding a request to the computers at Langley for information on all Consular Affairs employees who had been with the 19th Street passport office for more than two years.

  “What do you make of this, Nita?”

  “I don’t like it,” she said without looking away from her computer screen. “It sounds like it could be the one we’ve worried about all these years. The time we find we’re investigating one of our own operations.”

  “Why would we be snatching our own people overseas?”

  “Maybe we aren’t,” the woman guessed. “They may be gathering somewhere for some special assignment.” She looked back at him and smiled broadly. “People have disappeared for things like that before.”

  Fisher understood. He was one of them. As far as the people in Lindsborg, Kansas were concerned, he had run off at seventeen to join the RAF during the early years of World War II, been shot down flying an old Bi-wing Gladiator over Norway, and hadn’t returned. But like his man Falen and the rest of Unit 1, he had simply transitioned from one existence to another.

  It was true that Bud had run off to join the RAF. Under the command of Squadron Leader J.W. Donaldson he had also flown Glouster Gladiators, the last double-wing aircraft to see action in World War II. And he had been shot down in Norway where the 263rd squadron had been sent in the spring of 1940 to provide air cover for a British attempt to recapture the coastal city of Trondheim from the Germans. The squadron had staged off of a frozen lake near Domboos. Overnight, temperatures plummeted to below zero and the next morning a patrolling Messerschmitt found the nineteen pilots still trying to crank the Glousters over on the thick sheet of ice. Within an hour the sky was teeming with Luftwaffe attack aircraft. Only six Gladiators made it off the ground. Bud had been one of them. Low on fuel and out of ammunition, he had tried to reach the coast, getting to Valldal at the tip of a coastal fiord where the engine starved, flattening the prop against the wind like a Kansas barn side, and dropping the Gladiator onto the ice pack in a broken pile of scrap.

  He awoke in a fisherman’s cottage in the village of Alusand along the Norwegian Sea. His back had been broken in two places, leaving his body lifeless below the waist. For the next two years, no one heard from Bud Lilijigren. Then in the spring of 1942 a new voice began to broadcast from the Norwegian coast. Code named Northern Lights, the voice relayed vital German ship and troop movements to allied warships hidden at the edge of the horizon. The information was always good – too good for the Gestapo, and in April of 1943 two members of the Norwegian underground lifted Northern Lights from his bed at midnight as German agents pounded at the front door of the fisherman’s cottage. His rescuers drove Bud to the harbor where he was secreted in the bottom of a fishing trawler, transferred to an American destroyer, and three weeks later made port at Norfolk, Virginia. />
  There were no bands waiting at the pier for the celebrated Voice of Norway. No crowds of flag waving countrymen. No showers of confetti. Only a man in a neat business suit who wheeled the young, American-born Swede to a waiting automobile. To the rest of the world, Bud Lilijigren was dead. At the Washington headquarters of the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, he continued to receive and analyze intelligence data for the critical war effort in the Baltic. When the war ended and Truman discontinued the OSS in 1946, resurrecting it the following year as the CIA, Bud was again given the Baltic Desk.

  On a cold Friday afternoon in late spring of 1961, the agency Director entered Bud’s office on the third floor of the headquarters building in Langley, Virginia, and closed the door quietly behind him.

  “Bud, I’d like you to resign,” he said simply.

  Bud wheeled his chair from behind the cluttered desk to face the Director at close range.

  “I’m too good for you to ask me to resign. What do you really want?”

  The Director’s face was stony. “Just as I said. It’s time for you to get out. With your military time, you’ve got your twenty years. Plus, you’ve got disability pay. You’ll do fine.”

  Bud placed his hands in his lifeless lap and studied the Director’s expressionless face.

  “There’s more to this than you’re telling me. Did I cross someone?”

  “It appears that way to some of the others around here.”

  “Who? I think I’d know about something like that.”

  The Director leaned back loosely against the office wall and crossed one ankle over the other. “How long have we been in this business, Bud? Since ’43? I came just before we picked you out of Norway.”

  “May of ’43,” Bud acknowledged.

  “You’ve been one of the best from the beginning. I’ve always told people inside that you’re the best recruiter we have. Sometimes I’ve wondered about your bias for ex-flyers, but I have to admit your people last, and have talent and grit. Your sector’s the flagship of the agency.”

  “This doesn’t sound like a farewell address. Where’s the ‘but…’?”

  “But…,” the Director continued, “things have changed. These are new times. We’re having to operate with too many constraints. Too near the surface. That forces an accumulation of errors and somehow our victories don’t cancel them out.” He looked very tired. “Some heads are going to roll, and I want you out first.”

  “When am I retiring?”

  “End of the week.”

  “Any choice?”

  “No.”

  For a second time Bud disappeared, this time to a modest rural home hidden down a twisting country lane five miles from Ashburn. The house had ramped access at every door, extra wide hallways and the most sophisticated array of electronic gear Bud had seen. With the elaborate console came a partner, a brilliant soft-spoken woman named Anita. No last name. Just Anita. When Bud reached the house she met him in the drive and wheeled him into the study where she presented him with a handwritten letter from the Director.

  “I’m sorry I had to handle things this way,” it began, “but I’ve learned that ignorance is the best cover. Everything you need to know is in the manual in the study and in Anita’s head. Read the manual thoroughly, memorize its contents and burn it”

  “I’ve given each of you the best partner I could find. Take care of each other. You’ll find this a lonely assignment. The operation is yours to run, Bud. Anita can handle the electronics. She’s a whiz. (By the way, don’t let her stories about Cuba convince you she has no heart. She’s a pussycat when you get to know her.)

  “I’m going to be resigning within a month. The new Director will know about you, and the President, of course, but they alone. No one will know where you are. You’re that deep and it has to stay that way. Your operation is called ‘Unit 1.’ Not terribly original, but I couldn’t think of anything that expressed your mission better. Your code name is Fisher. Much rests in your hands. Godspeed.”

  The Director had been right about Nita. She was bright and intuitive, gentle and at the same time fiercely strong-willed. None of the original electronic gear now remained. She had progressively replaced it with newer computers, scramblers and de-scramblers, satellite links and voice synthesizers that instantly examined a caller’s voice signature and determined identity and authorization. A digital display beside the phone indicated name, project assignment, and a brief status review of the operation. A smaller version of the equipment was fixed to Fisher’s mechanized wheelchair and accompanied him wherever he went.

  But Nita’s greatest value was her companionship. She refused to cater to his disability, but helped him work his impotent limbs until they responded with new tone and suppleness. He was now in his nineties and had grown to love her as much as life itself. Even now, he slept wrapped in her warm ample body. She had taught him that there was intense sexuality in the simple touching together of skin and lips and breasts. They had been together for over fifty years.

  As Fisher now turned to Nita and considered her suggestion that Falen’s DWATs might be involved in some kind of government operation, he was especially relieved that he wasn’t handling this one alone.

  “This reeks of the Company,” he said, frowning. “There’s obviously someone involved who knows a helluva lot about these people’s backgrounds and schedules.”

  “Do you think they’re being recruited for something?”

  Fisher shook his head. “Too diverse a mix.”

  “If it is our people, why would we want to kidnap an assortment of well off, ethnically diverse Americans?”

  Fisher didn’t have to consider his answer.

  “What do you figure is the greatest international fear for the average American right now?”

  “Becoming a second class economy.”

  “I mean strategically?”

  “Islamic terrorism, I imagine. Especially with the Afghan and Syrian situations unresolved.”

  “In some form, yes. But not in the national sense. What we really fear now are the crazies. The small irrational groups we can’t negotiate with or control with oil demand or international sanctions. The Bin Ladens of the world. And even though we got him, we apparently can’t get to them all. They’re either too careful to keep themselves distanced from their acts, or they aren’t official entities – like the cartels in Mexico. What we need as a country is an incident of such magnitude that no one, not even our legitimized enemies, would object or intervene if we went after them.”

  “You think we might be getting ready to create such an incident? Stage a major hostage crisis?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Why not announce the losses as they occur? To keep people continuously angry?”

  “Depends on how we’re planning to run it. We may not want to give the terrorists a chance to deny it. And we’ve learned that hostages taken one-by-one don’t cause much of a stir, even when the cumulative number gets to be pretty large.”

  Nita frowned. “I don’t like this a bit. And we’re heading into the middle of it.”

  Fisher smiled thinly. “Send in your request for information on the passport office personnel. I think we’ll find out pretty quickly if we’re treading on someone’s toes.”

  ELEVEN

  The plan would work. Ben was sure of it. He just couldn’t convince Jim Cannon.

  “This whole system can’t be that loose,” Jim continued to argue. “The guards have to know how many are in each room”

  Ben knelt up from his fiftieth push-up.

  “Let’s test it then. New guards come in tomorrow morning. We’ll make up my bed as an extra, hang the blankets down over yours, and I’ll slide under it when they bring breakfast. If there’s no reaction, we’ll figure they don’t know I’m here.”

  “Yeah, and if they do? What then? You get the gun crammed down your throat.”

  “I curl up in a little fetal ball and act crazy. If there are many of us in here,
someone’s bound to have lost it by now. You just say I’ve been like that all night – hiding under the bed.”

  When the guards’ steps sounded in the hall outside the cell the next morning, Ben rolled under the bed and pressed his back against the wall, still able to see his captor’s feet as one of the men entered with the tray. The feet walked quickly to the table, deposited the tray and left abruptly. Ben slid halfway out onto the floor.

  “What’d I tell you! They didn’t even look around for me.” He jumped to his feet, pumping his fist as if he had just made a diving stop on a hard hit ground ball, and thrown the runner out by a step. “I told you it’d work. They don’t have any idea who’s in here.”

  “He could have thought you were in the bathroom. I’m not going to risk this on one test.”

  “The bathroom door’s open. And the guy didn’t even pause. I tell you, they don’t know.”

  “Let’s do it again then. I guarantee ya, they’ll start looking pretty soon.”

  They repeated the experiment with each visit until the guards changed. The man bringing the tray showed no concern that Jim was alone in the room.

  “They must think I eat a helluva lot,” he said, looking at the few leftovers on one of the evening trays.

  “I don’t think they think anything. They bring these in, pick them up, and don’t want to know more than that.”

  Jim frowned skeptically. “If they’re that tuned out, let’s change on them next shift. One day you go under, the next day I go under.”