Ghost Rendition Read online

  “Okay, how about this. Any idea who all these guys are who are trying to kill you, and me in the bargain?” I asked.

  “They’re not contractors like you?”

  “The agency doesn’t assign more than one to a job.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Can you still get into the CIA servers without giving away where we are?”

  “Of course.”

  “See if you can pick up anything about a big cleanup. We’ve left a lot of mess the past few days. If we can find out who knows about it at the Agency, we might get some clues as to who we’re dealing with,” I said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Go to my kid’s soccer game. He spends all his time in his room with his computer. I’m worried he’s going to end up like you.”

  The kid actually guffawed. He might figure out sarcasm yet.

  • • • • • • • • • •

  AYSO is an evil plot perpetrated on unsuspecting suburban families. It’s short for American Youth Soccer Organization, and they sucker the parents with happy rhetoric about the joys of participation and the beautiful lessons learned from the beautiful game. And they bribe the kids with participation trophies. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought it was an NSA platform to fish personal information from gullible parents and to spot misfit kids to recruit.

  I was never very good at sports, but that didn’t stop my father from pushing me out onto the Little League field. He said it taught discipline and teamwork. I swore never to commit the same crime against Devon. But Rowan had evidently been a college soccer player, though playing at Vassar hardly seems to count, and he had lobbied Suzanne to sign Devon up with the evil empire.

  The field was a good couple of miles away, and my car was at Lino’s. I jogged there at a pretty good clip. I tried Nachash’s emergency number along the way. He was big on old school conditioning. He scoffed at treadmills, StairMasters, and elliptical machines. I had a jump rope, a medicine ball, and a chin-up bar. Other than that it was push-ups, sit-ups, and roadwork. The whole idea of driving to a gym so you can run or climb without going anywhere seemed absurd to Nachash. AYSO soccer would have sent him into orbit. By the time I got to the field, the game had started. I have to admit I got a lump in my throat seeing Devon in his little green uniform. Then I saw Rowan in a matching jersey, and I felt like I was going to puke it up. That was why Rowan wanted Devon to play soccer, he wanted to coach.

  “You’re late as usual,” Suzanne said.

  “You’re talking to me. That’s a good sign.”

  “We’re still Devon’s parents. He needs both of us.”

  “He has Rowan. What could go wrong?” I said.

  “At least he’s trying. I don’t see you signing up to coach him.”

  “And that’s a bad thing? Have you met our son?”

  “Right, it’s better that he stay in his room all day doing who knows what on his computer. Dean has been kicking a ball to him every night. His car was stolen and he’s still here coaching.”

  I tried not to smile at the image of Rowan’s Jaguar full of bullet holes and jackknifed up on the curb. “Dean wants an excuse to squeeze into a soccer jersey again and pretend he’s an athlete.”

  I felt pretty good about that line until Suzanne teared up, which immediately ended the argument, with me losing.

  “I’m sorry. I’m glad Devon is getting some fresh air.” I don’t know what that means. My mother used to say it to me. “Why don’t you go outside and get some fresh air?” Was there something wrong with the air inside? And if there was, why didn’t she do something about it? I’d nod my head and go back to reading. Given how I turned out, maybe fresh air could help Devon. “I know you’re worried about him, but he’s a great kid. He’s not doing drugs. His grades are good. He’s taking a little while to adjust, that’s all. Middle school is a jungle.”

  “Now you’re patronizing me.”

  “Is it working?” I asked.

  “How am I supposed to deal with you?”

  “Suzanne, I love Devon more than anything in the world. I would take a bullet for him and not think twice.”

  “Dying is easy. Talking to your kid is hard,” she said.

  “I’ll talk to him. I promise.” I wanted to kiss the tears off her cheek like I used to when we were first dating. Why was she crying back then? I couldn’t remember. That probably wasn’t a good sign.

  Standing next to her and not holding her hand felt odd. Suzanne was a big hand holder. She liked tactile sensations. Gardening, cooking, fixing things, she enjoyed it all. Her hands weren’t beautiful to look at. They were hands that got used, with calluses from countless home improvement projects. I didn’t have to worry about squeezing too hard. They were always warm. And they fit perfectly into mine.

  I had just left med school when I met her. A fellow resident fixed us up. She had dropped out of interior design school. Maybe that’s why our friends fixed us up. They thought two quitters would get along. She told me I wasn’t a bad person for not wanting to be a doctor. I assured her that not wanting to decorate rich peoples’ homes wasn’t a character flaw. And when I walked her home, she slipped her hand into mine. We shared a short but nice good-night kiss, but it was the hand holding that stayed with me. Sometimes we’d go to a movie neither of us wanted to see, just to sit in the dark and hold hands.

  I looked over at her hands now. They were by her side, within easy reach. How had they gotten so far away?

  I checked the Health Matters job board on my phone to distract myself, but there was still nothing. The more time elapsed without contact from Nachash or Rob, the more likely they were dead.

  “You’re like a little kid,” Suzanne said. “You can’t focus for ten minutes.”

  “What is there to focus on? Devon’s on the bench, and I have no idea what’s going on.”

  “You should read Soccer for Morons. I’m sure Connor would be happy to give you a copy.”

  Suzanne didn’t like Connor or the books. The idea that her husband wrote books for morons never sat well with her. She had encouraged me to be a writer when we were first dating. She said I told a good story. She thought writing a novel about my relationship with my father would be therapeutic. I half considered it for a while, but Rob was recruiting me pretty hard. Ridding the world of bad guys seemed easier than mining my personal demons. Writing the Morons books, I managed to disappoint my father and Suzanne.

  When Devon finally got into the game, or match, or whatever they call it, he looked completely miserable. Rowan kept yelling at him to move. Devon seemed to have no idea where he wanted him to go. My only consolation was that Suzanne didn’t look particularly happy with Rowan’s yelling. I know that’s petty of me, but I thought I was showing remarkable self-control for not shooting him.

  The match finally ended after about a century. Devon played less than five total minutes. The teams formed two lines and each kid shook hands with every other kid, which was a nightmare of germ transmission. Rowan took another eternity giving the team a final pep talk. The guy had a captive audience and he wasn’t going to waste it.

  “Devon looked good out there,” I said to Suzanne.

  She snorted, which made me want to kiss her.

  Finally, Devon came trotting over. “Hey Dad, what are you doing here?”

  That hurt. Had I not been around? I guess we used to spend more time together. I’d take him to the park and push him on the swings, which usually made him nauseous. He has my inner-ear issues. I assumed that he had gotten busier with school and doing all the things that he liked to do while not going outside to get some fresh air. I talked to him or texted with him almost every day, more than I talked to anyone else besides Nachash. Maybe it’s different with kids than adults. Maybe it was like dog years, going a day without talking to Devon was like a week for an adult. My dad used to make me go on rounds with him at the hospital. All his patients were way too sick. I hated it. I needed to find somethin
g that Devon and I could do that he wouldn’t hate.

  “I’m here to watch you play,” I said.

  “Why? I suck.”

  “I thought you were great. You were really moving.”

  Devon gave me his mother’s snort.

  “Wasn’t Dev awesome? I’m going to make him a real player,” Rowan said.

  Devon rolled his eyes, and I made a mental note to contribute to his college fund in gratitude.

  “We’re going out to the diner to celebrate. You’re welcome to come.” Rowan invited me to join my own family.

  I grunted a “No thank you,” and gave Devon a high five. “Text me later, okay?”

  I watched them walk away together, the three of them. At least Suzanne and Rowan weren’t holding hands. I jogged home. I think better on the move. It was going to take a while to unravel what Pratt had set in motion. The question was, where to headquarter the operation. I didn’t want to put my family in danger, but I didn’t want to leave them unprotected either. The unwritten rule was that agents and contractors leave each other’s families alone, but the people who blew up Rob’s house and Nachash’s studio obviously weren’t concerned with collateral damage.

  It would be much easier to hand over Pratt to the first agent or contractor who showed up and wash my hands of it all. But the fact was, even if Pratt was trying to compromise a critical NSA initiative, he didn’t deserve to be tortured and killed for it. It was also true that nobody cared what I thought. Pratt had been designated as a threat that I had been hired to eliminate. If I failed, I became a threat and I had no illusions about how I would be dealt with. And it was not like I had anyone to plead my case to. Officially I didn’t exist.

  Rob’s supervisor would know me, at least by my handle, but I had no idea who that might be. The CIA New York field office had been secretly housed behind a false business front in a nondescript building at 7 World Trade Center. The building was destroyed in the 9/11 attacks. The best intelligence was that Bin Laden hadn’t identified it as a target. He got lucky. The CIA did too. They didn’t lose a single agent. You have to hand it to them, they know how to evacuate a building. They got all the secret files out, but it took weeks to get back to business as usual. The office got rebuilt, but a more decentralized plan was adopted. Agents like Rob got to basically telecommute. That way, if the office got hit again, a network of agents wouldn’t miss a beat. His supervisor might be located at the new field office or he might operate remotely. I had no way of knowing.

  I found Pratt right where I had left him, on the couch, banging away at his laptop. He was surrounded by empty Capri Sun packages and assorted crackers and chips I didn’t remember I had. Was this what Devon did all afternoon, eat fake food and lose himself in his computer? Would he grow up to be like Pratt, smart but dangerously naïve?

  “What have you found?” I asked.

  “The CIA had a secure connection directly into the Advanced Crypto servers with minimal internal security. That was one of the ways they tried to help the NSA keep an eye on us. Of course, we encrypted our code to mess with them, and we used the connection to open up a wormhole into their servers. They’ve locked me out of my Advanced Crypto account, and added a new layer of encryption that I’ve never seen before. It’s not hard to hack into the system itself, the firewall is pretty basic, but they’ve encoded every piece of data separately with a unique form of encryption for each. It’s fascinating. Data object encryption isn’t new, but this is a creative approach.”

  “I’m glad you’re having fun, but we have to find the people who are after you before they find us. There has to be a primary server for the CIA New York office. That’s your target. My contact’s name was Robert Brooks Jr. His code name was Shrink. Find anything you can about him, especially who his supervisor was.”

  “I’ll need more firepower. I can’t break this kind of encryption off a laptop.”

  “Where can you get that?”

  “Advanced Crypto.”

  “You want to go back to your old office?”

  “It’s the only place I know that has that kind of processing power.”

  “What is the security like at the office?”

  “There isn’t any. We’re supposed to look like a regular company.”

  “That means they’re good at hiding it. Look for a silent alarm system, webcams, and signal detectors. If you can be ready by tomorrow night, we’ll take our chances.”

  “I’ll be ready. I just need supplies.”

  After a quick stop at the local supermarket to load up on candy and soda, I worked at my computer and Pratt worked at his.

  “Did you know that the key to throwing a knife is gauging your distance from your target? Every five steps is about one revolution. If you’re throwing blade first, you don’t want to be eight steps from your target or you’re going to hit him with the handle and just make him mad. Actually you’re better off shooting him, instead of intentionally disarming yourself, but this is a book about stabbing weapons.” I don’t know why I was sharing my work with Pratt. Maybe I was lonelier than I thought.

  “What kind of book?” Pratt asked with a mouth full of Starbursts.

  “Stabbing Weapons for Morons. It’s going to be a big seller.”

  “Do you actually enjoy writing it?”

  “I would have to say, no.”

  “Then why do it?”

  “I enjoy eating and paying my rent. I don’t enjoy alimony and child support, but I have to pay them too. And if I don’t get this chapter to my editor by tomorrow, I don’t get my next payment, my ex-wife doesn’t get her next check, and it’s bad times all around,” I said.

  “Don’t you make enough money as a contractor?”

  “Not if I don’t deliver on my renditions.” That one felt bad as soon as it left my mouth.

  “Is it hard to hand over people when you know that they’re going to be killed?” Pratt asked.

  “The guys who take whatever assignments come their way make good money. At least that’s what Rob used to say. I told him I would only take cases where there was a clear bad guy. He used to laugh at me and say we’re all bad guys.”

  “You’re like me. You want to do the right thing,” he said.

  “Most of the time I don’t know what that is. But yeah, killing should always be hard. And it should never be about money.”

  “Well, you didn’t do it. That’s what counts.”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “You’re being sarcastic, right?” he said hopefully.

  • • • • • • • • • •

  I never pulled an all-nighter in college, but I often stayed up all night to get my Moron chapters done. Pratt worked through the night with me, chugging orange soda and chewing Starbursts like they were tobacco. I emailed my chapter to Connor at noon and crashed for a few hours. Pratt kept going. I got us some bad takeout from China Village, the only Chinese food place in town. When we first moved here from the City, Suzanne and I made fun of anyone who was brave enough to eat there. Now I had it at least once a week. Pratt ate it in big sloppy chopsticks-full.

  “Any luck getting to their security?” I asked him.

  “I did that last night,” he scoffed with a mouth full of noodles.

  “So what have you been working on?”

  “CIA encryption. It’s cool stuff.”

  “I thought you had to get into Advanced Crypto to break it.”

  “I do, but the more I work on it, the quicker I’ll be able to crack it. And it’s fun.”

  “Aren’t you worried someone will realize what you’re doing and trace you back here?”

  He gave me an, “Oh please” look and kept eating.

  “How did you start working for the Agency?” he asked, finally pausing to breathe.

  “I decided I didn’t want to be a doctor and they were hiring.”

  “I can’t see you in med school.”

  “Me neither, but my father could,” I said.

  “My father w
anted me to go into the family business. He was all set to send me to business school. He was out of his mind when I got a scholarship to MIT. I was always a math geek.”

  “I know. I’ve seen your file.”

  “What else does it say about me?” he asked.

  “That you’re an Egyptian sleeper agent, for starters.”

  “Ha. I’ve never been out of the country.”

  “That’s what a sleeper agent would say. Get ready, we need to go,” I said.

  I outfitted myself, and we took the train to Marble Hill and then the subway to Fordham Road. I put on my disguise and walked to Jerome Avenue. Lino was kind of a clown, but he did good work. The Camry looked good as new. I’d even had him put in bulletproof glass. With as much as I was getting shot at, it was cheaper than having to replace the windows again, and if anyone noticed, I’d just say I was paranoid. I was already known as a germophobe, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch. I endured Lino’s usual wisecracks and picked up Pratt back at the subway station.

  “Why did you end up as a contractor instead of an agent?” Suddenly he was full of questions.

  “I had a particular profile on my psych evaluation.”

  Pratt guffawed. You could never tell what the kid would find funny.

  “I didn’t show up as a psychopath or anything. I had a teacher named Nachash who used to say that I live in my own space. I work better on my own.”

  “What subject did he teach?”

  “He would tell you his subject was life. The parts about hitting people were a byproduct,” I said.

  “I like working on my own too. And Advanced Crypto lets you bring dogs to work, so that’s fun.”

  It was like talking to a little kid, you never knew if he understood what you were talking about. I had to hand it to him though, he had found and disarmed the Advanced Crypto security system and logged everyone out for what looked like routine maintenance. We waltzed into an empty office. It was all cubicles except for four corner offices. Pratt set up in one that belonged to his project supervisor and had the highest-level systems access. I prowled the office for backup security Pratt might have missed.