Ghost Rendition Read online

  “What are you doing here, Shrink?” I asked him, knowing that he couldn’t summon the breath to answer. “I could have killed you.”

  Shrink was a human intelligence specialist. It was another medical analogy and a reference to his height. The Agency isn’t known for its comedic talents.

  I dismantled my belt buckle gun and reassembled my belt to give him time to catch his breath. Devon’s lunch had fallen out of my jacket. The organic peanut butter and real fruit jelly sandwich lay face down in the dirt.

  “I should have seen you coming. Too long out of the field,” he managed to wheeze. He struggled to his feet and got in my car. “New directive. Have to test all field ops. Response time and all that. You did well.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Agency-wide. No choice.”

  We both knew he was lying. Contractors don’t get tested by their contacts. We’re not supposed to exist. He had signaled code red while I was dropping off Devon. That was a message. He was telling me I was vulnerable. The question was why? I decided to send a message of my own. I drove him to my house. It broke every rule of spy-craft. You never bring work home. But I had to do something that would make my reaction clear.

  “You, or anyone else, come near my son again and it won’t end in a conversation,” I said as he sat on the couch in my living room.

  “Do you have any of that lavender tea you always tell me about?” he asked. “I’ve been dying to try it.”

  It was a reference to our shared history and a signal that the stakes were dire. This wasn’t a threat. It was a warning.

  “Sloppy business last night,” I said, as I brought him his tea.

  He put it down on the coffee table and didn’t look at it again. “I’ve seen worse,” he said.

  So this wasn’t about the kill job. I sat in the beat-up armchair across from him.

  “Your rendition is on a tight timeline,” he said. “It’s a tricky one. Read the file carefully.”

  He put a thumb drive on the table next to his untouched tea. Normally I would receive all the information about my assignment in an encrypted email. And I always read the file carefully. “It doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. Maybe I should pass,” I said.

  “We both know it’s too late for that. I have complete confidence in you,” he said and got up to go.

  That went without saying too. So why did he say it?

  “Do you need a ride?” I asked. I needed more time to question him.

  He shook his head. “Devon’s getting big. He looks like you,” he said.

  He coded me at the school, and then he made another reference to Devon. What was he trying to tell me? “We were hoping he would take after his mother,” I said.

  “We don’t usually get what we want,” he said. “Take good care of him. He still needs you.”

  What the hell was he talking about? Of course I would take care of Devon. I watched him walk down the block and get into a tan Ford Taurus. He wasn’t supposed to know where I lived, but he not only knew, he had guessed that’s where I would take him. That was part of the warning too. Shrink liked to play games, liked to show he was in control, but he wasn’t prone to dramatics. Something had seriously alarmed him.

  I plugged the thumb drive into my laptop and used my encryption key generator to open file R227855qxuD. The R was for rendition. The D meant deadly force was authorized. Other than that it was just a reference, a number that mapped to a file. A file that said the Agency had uncovered a sleeper tech. In the Cold War days, the Soviets tried to plant sleepers in our spy agencies. It wasn’t easy. They vet those guys pretty hard. Now sleepers are planted in technology companies. If you know the backdoors to the crypto technology they sell, you can hack the servers that use them. And if you can get into the right server, there isn’t anything you can’t uncover.

  My rendition’s name was Danny Pratt. According to the file, his identity was pretty tight. He grew up on Long Island, went to MIT, and worked at a tech startup named Advanced Crypto. He lived alone in an apartment in the Village and liked to hang out at the local Starbucks. A CIA plant at Advanced Crypto had implicated him in cyber espionage linked to terrorist operations. His roots were suspected to be Egyptian with ties to Al Qaeda. The job was to extract him and make it look like he picked up and took a job with a gaming company overseas. I would deliver him to a black airfield. He would get flown back to Egypt where a bunch of CIA-trained contractors would use enhanced interrogation techniques on him, and I would go home to collect my fee. Renditions always paid well, but since the McCain-Feinstein amendment banned EIT, the price had doubled. If you got caught, you got hung out to dry as a renegade traitor.

  The rest of the file on Pratt described his work and social routines, his Social Security number, date of birth, credit card and bank numbers, and his family, friends, and acquaintances. It was a thin brief and all tied up neatly. Egyptian origin provided a pretext to rendition him there. And the Al Qaeda ties justified extraordinary measures, by the Agency’s own internal logic anyway. Extraordinary renditions can go to Syria, Jordan, Morocco, and a number of other countries where holding prisoners indefinitely and using torture isn’t a problem. Some of them are worse than others, but once a rendition goes to Egypt, they’re never seen again. Was this guy really involved in something that dangerous? If he had been able to hold cover all those years, he could legitimately be a serious threat. If Shrink hadn’t acted strangely, I wouldn’t have thought twice. But he had gone to great lengths to tip me that something was wrong. Renditions were dangerous enough. This one came with land mines.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I hoped that on-site research would give me some answers, but first, I had to get rid of my adrenaline and clear my head. A good fight with Nachash was what I needed. He ran a studio that taught Krav Maga to soft, rich suburban dads who wanted to pretend that they weren’t soft, rich suburban dads. He didn’t teach any of the classes. He was the mystical presence that gave the place the authenticity that pretenders required. But he did train a hand-picked clientele. I had never met any of his other students, but I could guess that they were mostly in the business. Who else would torture themselves to learn to kill efficiently?

  The front of the studio looked appropriately Middle Eastern, with Hebrew lettering and images of desert combat. I went around to the back, which was surrounded by a high brick wall, and went down to what looked like a service entrance to the basement. The hidden security cameras, bulletproof glass, and electronically controlled locks told you that it was something else.

  He was waiting for me in one of his specially propped workout rooms. This was not about karate GIs and thick mats. Each room was set up to mimic a real-life situation, and you fought in street clothes. This room looked like a Starbucks. It wasn’t the first time that a fight room was coincidentally set up to match my brief. Nachash claimed it was because our chi was in harmony. I had other suspicions.

  “I got a red code when I was dropping off Devon. What’s going on?”

  “You know the rules. We leave our work at the door,” Nachash responded with infuriating serenity.

  He leaned easily with one hand on a wooden chair. Average height, dark ruddy complexion, and regular features, he wouldn’t attract your attention if he was sipping a latte at an actual Starbucks, but I knew better, I knew that when he moved, he was like shifting water, every part of him sliding in perfect unison. It also occurred to me, not for the first time, that he was one of the most infuriating people I’ve ever met.

  “This is Devon. It’s personal.”

  “Examine your premise. You assume that I know something about your work and that I am withholding it from you. What does this say about you?”

  “That I’m sick of your pseudo-Zen shit and want a straight answer for a change.”

  “Impatience betrays a lazy mind.”

  He whipped the chair he was leaning on at my head as if it were a Frisbee. I ducked, rolled under a table, and flipped it on its side to deflect it. I
lifted the table and charged Nachash, trying to crush him between the tabletop and the counter. He spun away with ease. We knew each other too well, after years of sparring, to succumb to obvious tactics.

  He broke a leg off from the table and hit me in the small of my back. He has a slim build, and his strength still surprises me sometimes. My bulletproof vest absorbed the worst of the blow, or I would have been pissing blood for weeks. I wear a vest on the job, so that’s how I spar. It makes me a little slower and less flexible, but it protects some vital organs. By the time I had managed to break off a table leg, Nachash had hit me twice more. He was enjoying himself.

  “You would be dying painfully now. I would stand over you and watch the light go from your eyes.”

  I faked a looping swing with the table leg, reverse pivoted and hit him with the butt end. He deflected the blow with his table leg, which splintered. He released it and chopped down hard in the same motion. My hands went numb. I dropped the table leg and stumbled backward, barely avoiding the palm of his hand as it swept back up toward my nose.

  “Your technique suffers from lack of use,” he said.

  I could’ve sparred with Nachash 24/7, and he would have still told me that I don’t practice enough. Now though, he happened to be right. I hadn’t been to the studio in almost a week. It’s amazing how fast you lose your edge. I backpedaled as he launched a series of straight kicks at my groin. He slowly shook his head, which was worse than his insults. He doesn’t believe in trying to move away from attacks. The idea is to block them. “The body can’t move as fast as the hand or foot,” he says. All that jumping around looks great in tournaments and movies, but trying to jump to the side in time to avoid a blow coming straight at your nose is pretty hard in real life. That’s the whole point of Krav Maga. The Israelis invented it to be the ultimate in street fighting. It isn’t fancy. You block your opponent’s strike and then launch a strike of your own in the same motion. “Turn defense into offense,” is another Nachash favorite.

  I stumbled and fell to my knees. His kick took me in the chest. I leaned into it before it could gather full force, jamming his foot back toward his leg. My ribs were still sore from the bullet I took. The vest dulled the impact, but it still brought tears to my eyes. I locked his leg with my right hand and brought my left fist up into his groin. It wasn’t my best punch, but it must have hurt plenty.

  Nachash barely flinched. Everyone gets hit. The best fighters recover the quickest. He broke my hold on his leg with a sharp downward thrust. I whipped my head backward knowing that his next move would be a kick to my head. It still caught me under the chin and sent me flying backward, my legs pinned under me. He kneeled on my chest and gave me the ceremonial punch to the throat.

  “You are dead . . . again.” It was the way we ended every fight.

  “Go ahead, tell me all the things I did wrong,” I said, as I lay on the ground.

  “You got in one good blow.”

  It was so close to a compliment that it almost made my ribs stop hurting.

  “You must make better use of the geography. What were the weapons at hand? Where do you have the advantage, and how can you get me there? Why am I positioned where I am? Where do I want to move you? Fighting without thinking is fighting to lose.”

  That was more like it. I started to answer, but he waved me silent and sat down cross-legged next to me.

  “You have been distracted lately. Why?”

  I struggled into a sitting position. I am not flexible to begin with, and sitting cross-legged with a vest on is not comfortable.

  “Family stuff. Nothing you care about.”

  “I care deeply about family. It is the soil in which our roots grow strong.”

  “I don’t even want to try to figure out what that means.”

  “You do yourself a disservice by pretending that you are not philosophical.”

  “You waste your time pretending that I am.”

  “How old were you when your mother brought you to me?”

  This caught me by surprise. Nachash always chided me that looking back meant missing the moment.

  “You had just turned ten and you were getting bullied. I asked you what you wanted from me, and you said your father wanted you to learn how to fight. I asked you again what you wanted, and you said you wanted to learn so you didn’t have to fight. You were philosophical even then.”

  “I got that from The Karate Kid.”

  Nachash shook his head.

  “Are you trying to tell me to walk away from my assignment?” I asked.

  “I never involve myself in your work. Your body and your soul are my only concerns.”

  “Will this assignment separate my soul from my body?”

  Nachash stared back at me. He never laughed at my jokes. I had done a fair amount of research into Nachash’s background over the years. It was suspiciously clean. He grew up on a kibbutz in Israel, studied with Imrich Lichtenfeld who founded Krav Maga, and then came to the United States to spread his version of it. He lived in a part of the studio’s basement that I had never seen and appeared to have no personal life.

  Krav Maga is all about brutal efficiency. It has none of the ceremony of other martial arts. Nachash added back some of the spirituality. Sometimes I thought he was brilliant. Sometimes I thought he was full of shit. I always wondered if he was secretly a recruiter for the Agency.

  “I’d love to sit around and laugh it up, but I have to get yelled at by a guidance counselor,” I said.

  “Your son could use the discipline that I taught you.”

  “You’re very persistent for a Buddhist. Aren’t you supposed to practice acceptance?”

  “I accept what I cannot change.”

  “There’s no way I’m getting Devon involved in any of this. Not ever,” I said more angrily than I intended.

  “You will do what you believe is best. Hopefully, you will come to see the truth of what that is.”

  I left without saying good-bye. The man made me crazier than my ex-wife. I had barely enough time to get my car window replaced at Mike’s Service Station in town and still get to Devon’s school on time. Mike’s a terrible mechanic, but I still use him for the small jobs because he’s quick, he takes cash, and he isn’t curious.

  I got home in time to grab a quick shower. Suzanne kept telling me that I should get one of those low-pressure showerheads that conserve water. A good hot shower is one of the few luxuries I have left. The bathroom filled with steam as I tried to organize my thoughts. Things were moving too quickly. “The slower your thoughts, the quicker your reactions,” was another Nachash favorite. I needed to figure out what Shrink was trying to tell me. What did he tell me? What didn’t he tell me? Where was the pattern?

  I heard the door to the bathroom open and prepared for a different kind of assault. Mimi stepped into the shower and pressed her oversized breasts against me. She was recently divorced and had splurged for a boob job with the settlement. A slim redhead, she had opted for double Ds, which were definitely overkill, but they still felt pretty good sliding against my back.

  “I thought we talked about this,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t have given me a key if you didn’t want me to use it.”

  “It was supposed to be for emergencies.”

  “This is an emergency,” she said, grinding against me.

  I’ve been trained to resist standard interrogation techniques, but these attacks were rarely standard. They started a couple of months ago. I’d had innumerable talks with Mimi about the impropriety of midday booty calls between neighbors, but it never seemed to stick. Mimi and her husband, Carter, had lived next door before he came out of the closet and divorced her. She had given me an emergency key when I moved in and practically demanded that I reciprocate. It had seemed harmless enough since I never let work come anywhere near my home. The first time she had let herself in, opened her coat, and revealed her heavily augmented figure, I was eating dinner in front of the television. I’d almost t
hrown my knife at her out of reflex. Having to explain a dead, naked neighbor lying in my living room would have been extremely inconvenient. Mimi had been staging imaginative surprise attacks ever since.

  I grabbed her under her thighs, lifted her against the wall, and jammed myself inside her. That’s the secret of any well-planned assault, know your enemy’s weakness. And Mimi had intuited mine. I had no real social life, and I wasn’t ready to live like a monk.

  “How did you get so strong?” she gasped.

  Mimi had noticed my muscle tone the first time we were together. Luckily, she was more than willing to take post-divorce bodywork as an explanation. The scars were harder to account for. I hinted at a terrible childhood accident that I still didn’t like to talk about. Getting naked with someone who knows you is dangerous to your cover. That’s one of the reasons I kept telling Mimi that we had to stop, but I couldn’t seem to convince her.

  Mimi climaxed loudly, toweled herself dry and left the bathroom in a swirl of steam. She came, she conquered, and she left. Now I had to hurry if I wasn’t going to be late for the guidance counselor. I put on fatherly looking brown slacks and a light blue button-down shirt. They both needed ironing, but I didn’t have time, and I suck at it anyway.

  The newly replaced window on my Camry didn’t exactly match the others, which bugged the hell out of me. I rationalized that it would probably get shot out again soon anyway. Tinted windows are expensive to replace, but they make it much tougher to get an accurate shot at the driver. I would have gone for bulletproof, but it’s visibly thicker, which is hard to explain when you’re carpooling kids to a bowling party. And it’s very expensive. Some contractors keep separate cars for their jobs, but then you have to worry about where to keep them and who might see you driving off in a different car. My ten-year-old mud brown Toyota Camry hides nicely in plain sight.

  I parked in a handicap spot, sprinted to the main office and was told by a condescending secretary that the guidance office was on the other side of the school. More sprinting, sweating, and heavy breathing, and I burst into the guidance office. There were three closed doors. The nameplates read Ms. Trank, Ms. Persky, and Ms. Costello. I couldn’t remember which one was Devon’s guidance counselor. I knocked on Ms. Trank’s door and was greeted by a short, pit bull of a woman who informed me that she had never heard of Devon Alexander. I knocked on Ms. Persky’s door next and got an even less pleasant surprise. Suzanne was seated across the desk from Ms. Persky and next to her was her boyfriend, Dr. Dean Rowan. They both turned on me with accusing looks as if I were the intruder.