The Icarus Prediction: Betting it all has its price (17 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Boston

Sarah Kashvilli sat on a park bench along the Paul Revere Mall in Boston’s North End. It was a lovely spring morning as she looked across Unity Street at the historic Old North Church, where the “One if by land, two if by sea” lantern signal was given that triggered the American Revolution.

At the end of a leash was a Sheltie mix her parents had named “Cornwallis” which was a strange handle for a mutt who lived in this Founding Father venue. Maybe her folks thought he was a loser when they adopted him out of the shelter.

Boston’s North End was something of a thumbprint that stuck out on the south bank of the Charles River at the point where the waterway met the sea. Paul Revere had been born in the North End of a Huguenot father when it was a Protestant foothold in the Americas. Then decades later, the tidal wave of Irish immigration came to escape the potato famine and claimed the North End for their own, pushing the Protestants further upstream along the Charles River. The Italian migration that followed pushed the Irish out of the North End, and it morphed into a Little Italy. But with that ethnic flavor came the mafia, which ruled the North End for decades, and where executions in broad daylight were not uncommon.

But in recent times, the mafia influence in the North End had been largely defanged by a force even the Dons couldn’t contend with: real estate prices. The realm of the mafia had become yuppified, with young professionals and retired couples of means making a land grab. They came in droves to snap up dwellings and enjoy the history, ambiance, and the plethora of Italian restaurants.

After Sarah’s stepfather had retired from MIT, where he taught electrical engineering, her parents had sold their house in Cambridge eight months ago and moved into a condo in the North End. Still close to MIT but a distinct change of scene. It was her first visit home in three years, and it was a shock to be sleeping in the “guest” bedroom instead of her own.

But after a couple of days, it finally dawned on her. There was really no reason for her parents to move. It was their way of finally coming to closure with Alison’s death. On her rare trips home before, Alison’s room and Sarah’s room were always just as they’d left it. Not a speck of dust anywhere, as her mother cleaned it every day. Now the shrines were gone.

And with that realization, while sitting on a park bench holding the leash of a dog named Cornwallis, Sarah Kashvilli’s life seemed to implode in on her, as if the compass that had been guiding her was crushed and obliterated. She began to shake uncontrollably, and tears started rolling down her face as though some demon had been exorcised from her soul.

The Sheltie pricked his ears up looked at her questioningly, and she found herself asking the dog, “What’s wrong with me?” But in her heart, she knew. It was simple grief. After eleven years of being fueled by rage, hatred, and revenge, the reality of the loss of her sister finally caught up with Sarah. Alison was dead. No matter how many scalps she collected to even the scales, nothing would ever bring her back.

Sarah and Alison had been “Irish twins,” born eleven months apart, with Sarah the elder. Growing up, they’d had a kind of Jekyll and Hyde relationship that drove their parents nuts. One minute they would be playing and hugging each other, and the next moment one of them would say, “Hey! That’s my teddy!” And a furball of a catfight would ensue. They didn’t see much of their biological father, and unfortunately, their mother shared the same complaint. The girls had to deal with a messy divorce that brought them even closer. They stayed with their mother, while their father left to focus on his deal-making in Manhattan. Luckily, their mother found love again, and they were fortunate to find a stable household in which to grow up.

In their teenage years when one had a boyfriend, the other would plot and scheme to torpedo the relationship because they were jealous of any usurper who would steal the other sister’s attention. They were inseparable, with a bond that went deeper than any common sisterhood.

Then Sarah had left home and gone to Georgetown. Alison left the nest the next year for Columbia. Sarah went on to graduate in political science and snagged a job on a senator’s staff who was a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Alison took her degree in economics and went to work for an Internet startup in the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

For a few years, Sarah’s life was sprinkled with liberal doses of happiness. Alison would take the shuttle to DC, and they’d explore the Capitol and its environs. Or Sarah would ride the train to New York, and they’d take in a show. And sometimes they’d reinvade Boston, to their mother’s delight.

Then came the eleventh of September.

Sarah had arrived at work early that morning, eager to embrace her new duties in the wake of her promotion on the senator’s staff. She’d been accepted at Stanford law school but had pushed her matriculation back a year because of her promotion. She was in the chief of staff’s office planning the day when somebody barged in and yelled, “Turn on CNN!”

What happened next was like an out-of-body experience as she watched in horror when the second plane slammed into the South Tower. Her attempts to call through the clogged cellular circuits were fruitless, and she didn’t remember being physically dragged out of the senator’s office as the Capitol building was evacuated. Her only hazy memory of the rest of that day was of a black plume of smoke rising over the Pentagon.

The shock was paralytic in its severity. She was numb for weeks, going into months, and she did not shed a single tear. For when the shock wore off, the rage and anger welled up within her with a laserlike intensity, and she vowed that whoever had taken her sister would share Sarah Kashvilli’s pain.

She went to the senator and asked—demanded, really—that he sponsor her application into the Central Intelligence Agency. Langley had been flooded with applications in the wake of 9/11, but with some juice from a senator sitting on the Intelligence Committee, her app was plucked out of the pile.

From that moment onward, she resolutely focused on her search-and-destroy mission to execute the brothers of the hijackers of United Flight 175.

The only chink in her armor—where her humanity was reclaimed, if only briefly—came one night on a field exercise at Camp Peary, or “The Farm,” which was the CIA’s training facility near Williamsburg, Virginia. She’d been paired off with a Rhodes Scholar named Jarrod Stryker on an escape and evasion exercise. The rules were that after a simulated breakout from a prison facility, they had to evade capture while staying within the designated confines of the nine-thousand-acre Farm. If caught, they would spend the balance of the night in a nasty simulated interrogation, and the instructors bragged they rolled up 98 percent of all escapees. Had the exercise taken place earlier in the training regimen, they might have actually obeyed the rules. But since it was the last exercise prior to graduation, they’d learned the CIA was all about breaking rules.

Taking a variation on a theme that the best place to hide from the police is inside a police station, after the breakout, Jarrod led her
toward
their pursuers under the moonlight—stopping a few times along the way so he could pee at the base of separate trees.

“What the hell are you doing?” she enquired, as he zipped up his fly for the third time.

“Laying a false trail. Now just follow me,” he whispered as he grabbed her hand.

He led her to another oak tree where they took refuge in its old hollowed-out trunk. The space was confining, and Jarrod had to wrap Sarah up in his arms.

“Oh, terrific,” he whispered. “You wore some perfume?”

“You got a problem with that?” she countered.

“I don’t, but the dogs might.”

“Dogs?”

“How the hell do you think they find us at night?”

Just then, she heard the baying of hounds and peeked out of the hollow. Flashlights were approaching. “They’re coming,” she said.

“Well, let’s just hope my urine will be stronger than your
eau de
whatever.”

“Oh, Jarrod, you’re so romantic.”

And for the first time since she could remember, Sarah laughed. Severely suppressed, of course, but she laughed. And he did, too.

The hounds caught the scent of Jarrod’s bodily fluids and bayed loudly, jerking their handlers from tree to tree away from them. The pursuers flicked their lights up into the branches, thinking they’d treed their students, but they found nothing. The fugitives suppressed more laughter as they heard the handlers cursing the animals and jerking them further in the other direction.

Once clear, Jarrod reluctantly released Sarah from his grasp and led her by the hand toward the Camp Peary HQ. He took great stock in the fact she didn’t pull her hand away.

“Where are we going?” she whispered.

“Off to a warm bed and a cold beer. Not necessarily in that order.”

At the periphery of the headquarters was a small two-story structure made of brick, with a wooden veneer and gables on the second floor. He led her up the rickety entry steps and then pulled up his pant leg to untape a small felt case of tools from his ankle. He held it open for her and said, “Why don’t you do it? I believe you outscored me in that class.”

It was an array of lock picking tools. She chose one and went to work, asking, “What is this place, anyway?”

“It’s called Porto Bello. It was the hunting lodge of the last royal governor of Virginia. The camp brass will sometimes host visiting VIP receptions here. And sometimes the guests stay overnight.”

“You seem remarkably well informed.”

“Well, we’re in the intel business now, are we not?”

She sprung the lock and replied, “After you.”

They entered and felt their way to the kitchen where they opened a refrigerator for some subdued illumination.

“Hoowee! Hit the jackpot!” howled Jarrod. “Must be some leftovers from a reception.” Shrink-wrapped sandwiches, iced beer, and several bottles of wine were sitting on the shelf. “Hungry?”

“Famished.”

“Say no more.”

The sandwiches were zapped in the microwave and tops were popped as he chatted her up about lacrosse at Auburn and living at Oxford.

She found herself opening up, too, a little bit anyway, about Georgetown and the craziness that was Capitol Hill.

Neither probed too deeply, but after the rigors of Camp Peary, the release of tension came out of them like a gusher. Sarah rummaged around a kitchen drawer and came up with a corkscrew, and the liberation of the wine began.

About two in the morning, Jarrod said, “Well, I could use a shower.”

“Me, too.”

He led her upstairs, feeling their way along as they couldn’t turn on the lights to arouse suspicion. “I’ll go first,” he said, and he did.

While the water was running, she pulled the curtains back and let the moonlight stream into the bedroom. When he emerged from the bathroom, he wore a towel, and she was more than a little awestruck by his lacrosse washboard abs.

Without a word, she entered the bathroom and took her turn under the shower, and when she emerged her hair was swept up in a towel and another was around her torso. He was sitting on the edge of the bed. Their eyes locked, and she realized it was her decision. Go the opposite way into the other bedroom, or…

She dropped her towel, and he rose from the bed to take her into his arms.

She never saw him again until Beirut, five years later.

She never anticipated he would shield her and take the fall for her assassination of the 9/11 hijacker’s brother. It was an act of distilled chivalry, the likes of which she’d never seen before or since.

And now here she was. Thirty-something. Alone. Years deep in a quest of virulent revenge. Off for a few days and back at home, she was trying desperately to create the façade of a normal life

But then she bumped into a high school classmate of hers on a trip to the grocery store. The classmate droned on about her son in Little League, her daughter’s ballet lessons, and her husband the dentist. Sarah felt she might have been talking to a Martian for all they had in common. The CIA agent gave the dentist’s wife a bull cover story about her desk job in the State Department and left with a frightening realization of how far she’d left the rest of the world behind. And ironically, through it all—for more than the last
decade—
the only person who’d known her true motivation and purpose was Jarrod Stryker, the man who’d fallen on his sword to protect her to enable her blood quest to continue.