Undercover (3 page)

He was thinking about Paloma, wondering about the baby, when he was driven to the center on the base and was shown into an office, where a task force officer evaluated him briefly, handed him his papers, and released him to leave for Quantico. He arrived there half an hour later and was taken to his room. It was a small cubicle, with a bed, a chest, a chair, a desk, and a small refrigerator. It had a military feel to it. And he knew that other undercover agents would be at the DEA facility too, some of them in seclusion, which was all he wanted now. He wanted to be left alone with all his private thoughts, rather than being poked and prodded and having his mind emptied into a computer, the information to be stored at the DEA and the OCDETF fusion center, to be analyzed in depth by highly skilled agents.

He stood at the window of his room finally, and felt like he was in prison. He was far away from everything familiar to him. In a matter of hours, he had become Marshall Everett again, a man he no longer knew and didn't want to be. He ached to be in a hut in a jungle camp south of Bogotá with the woman he loved. And as he thought of her, and who he had to become again, he wished he were dead. There was nothing he wanted here. He felt like a stranger in his own country. Even speaking and hearing English seemed foreign to him. He had been thinking in Spanish for years. And as he closed his eyes that night and lay on his bed, he dreamed of the familiar jungle sounds and the velvet of Paloma's skin.

The vigorous debriefing Marshall underwent at the DEA facility in Quantico was harder than he had expected or remembered from the last time, after Ecuador. Or maybe it was just more difficult for him this time. He resented all their questions and everything he had to tell them, but as he had been taught to do, he emptied his mind and told them what he knew. He had gathered an incredible amount of information about Raul's operation, far more than his superiors had hoped. He had a meticulous memory for every detail, and knew more about Raul's operation than anyone had been able to discover before. He knew by then that the camp had been raided, and that El Lobo had escaped. Marshall wasn't surprised. Raul had been prepared at all times for such an event. He would have trekked through the jungle, hidden for as long as he had to, and managed to survive. Marshall was sure that he had escaped by speedboat on the river, or even flown out from a hidden airstrip somewhere in the jungle. A man like El Lobo couldn't be contained, or stopped. But Marshall had given them enough information to hamper his operation severely and slow him down for a while.

His superiors left to the psychologist the unpleasant task of telling him what had happened to Paloma. They waited until two weeks after he'd arrived. Marshall had been talking about Paloma and the baby for the past two weeks. It was all he could think of, particularly knowing that the baby must have been born by then. He hoped Paloma was all right. The psychologist told him that she had been killed before the raid, and her brother had shot her himself. When Marshall heard what had happened, he was shocked.

“He did it to hurt me,” Marshall said in a cold voice, shaking with rage.

“No,” the psychologist said gently, making note of Marshall's appearance. His eyes were blazing, but he looked controlled. “I'm sure he did it to punish his sister.” He hadn't expected that, or that Raul could be cold enough to kill his own sister, heavy with child. It told Marshall who he really was. He had known Raul was capable of coldhearted cruelty, but not to this extent. “I don't think he did it to punish you,” the psychologist reassured him, touched by the look of devastation on Marshall's face and, worse, in his eyes.

“You don't know how these people think,” Marshall said coldly. “He wanted to destroy what I love most, to punish me.” It seemed a little extreme, and slightly paranoid to the psychologist, but anything was possible. The psychologist assigned to him was bilingual, and they had conducted many of their sessions in Spanish, as Marshall often seemed more comfortable in Spanish now. He had lived his role for a long time, and it only confirmed to her that it had been time to bring him home. Everyone agreed. The psychologist was well aware that it would take years for him to recover from the loss of Paloma and their baby. And there was no one to comfort him—he had lost his parents years before in a car accident when he was in college. And his days of undercover work in the countries where Raul operated were over.

Her final recommendation was to keep him in the States at a desk job for a year. He needed time to calm down and heal, especially now, after Paloma's death. All he talked about was how much he wanted to return to undercover work in South America again, for revenge, anywhere they were willing to send him. He wasn't ready for his days of working undercover to end. Even if it meant working on lesser operations in Mexico, where Raul had less control. He didn't say it to the psychologist, but he wanted to find a way back to Colombia, locate Raul, and kill him, for what he had done to Paloma and their unborn child.

The psychologist had confirmed that the baby had not survived its mother's death. Only sophisticated methods in a hospital setting would have saved the baby after its mother was shot. That had been Raul's whole purpose, to kill them both, taking away everything Pablo loved. And now Marshall knew that Pablo Echeverría was as dead as Paloma and their child. He had been destroyed. All that was left was the shell of the man he was now: Special Agent Marshall Everett of the DEA.

After he heard the shattering news about Paloma, he spent another week in Quantico being debriefed, but he had already told them everything he knew. He felt empty and hollowed out, and after a night of sobbing over Paloma, he had not cried again and felt nothing. He was released at the end of the third week. He was given the keys to a furnished apartment in Georgetown, in a building reserved for returning undercover agents, and was assigned to a job at the South American desk at the Pentagon. It felt like a death sentence to him, and he could barely make himself go to work on the first day.

It was snowing, on a bitter cold day the last week in February, and his new office was as barren as his life. He had grown up in Seattle, but after his parents' death while he was in college, he had left and never returned. He had entered DEA training as the youngest member of his class, and had gone into undercover work, shortly after he graduated. Now after six years of it, he had no close friends, no family, no hometown or base, no one he wanted to resume contact with, nothing to do when he left work, and nothing to say when he was there. He analyzed the reports that were given to him, and handed in meticulous in-depth memos that showed how well he knew his subject, the area, the people involved, and their activities. He knew everything about the drug trade in Colombia and the countries he had dealt with for Raul. He inquired occasionally, but there had been no word of Raul, since he escaped while they raided the camp. And by the spring, Marshall felt as though he had been at his desk at the Pentagon for a hundred years. He turned twenty-nine and didn't care. He spent his birthday alone in front of the TV, as he did every night.

There was a Colombian restaurant he went to occasionally to eat the familiar food, and after bantering with the waiters in Spanish, when they asked him where he was from, he would say Bogotá. It was easier than explaining why he spoke Spanish the way he did. Anyone would have taken him for a native, which was how he felt. He had more in common with Latin Americans than with North Americans now.

Bill Carter checked on him from time to time, and knew he was doing extraordinary work, but talking to Marshall always unnerved him. There was something dead about him, as though his soul were gone. A part of him had died with Paloma, as Marshall knew only too well. The only thing Marshall wanted to know was when he could return to some kind of undercover work, anywhere in South America where he would not be remembered or associated with Raul. And Bill had the uncomfortable feeling that he wanted to go back for revenge. Marshall couldn't imagine spending the rest of his life at a desk. Undercover work was in his blood—he couldn't seem to get back to real life, whatever that was for an undercover agent who was expected to take on all the traits and habits and customs of a country and become a native in every way, then, when ordered to do so, forget all of it and come home again and turn into someone he could barely even remember. “Real life” was so much less interesting than the dangerous and exciting life he had led undercover.

The DEA was determined to keep him home for a year and reevaluate his situation then. They had no idea what to do with him after that, although Marshall had requested Mexico several times and insisted no one would recognize him there. But the psychologist had suggested that he needed an extended time in the States to reacclimate, and for a smooth reentry. Marshall felt as though he were living somebody else's life. He missed his missions for Raul, their morning meetings, their nightly brandies, and a last cigar while they recapped the day. Although he knew what he had been doing there and why, they had become friends. However much he hated Raul now for what he'd done to Paloma and their baby, Marshall missed their camaraderie, and the intelligent conversations and decisions shared, just as he ached for the exquisite beauty of Paloma, and everything he had known with her. It was a lost world for him, with nothing to replace it in the States. He felt like he had been sucked into a vacuum and was hanging in space between two worlds.

By May, it was hard for Marshall to believe he had only been back for three months. It felt like three years, and he couldn't imagine another nine months with a desk job at the DEA, let alone a lifetime of it, if they never sent him back to the field. By June, he was putting serious pressure on them to reassign him anywhere in the Spanish-speaking world, where the drug activities would put his experience to use and challenge him again. What he wanted more than anything was to work undercover and get out of the Pentagon.

By September, after a long, hot, dreary summer in Washington, he had spent every weekend in his apartment, and he felt like he was going insane. He requested a meeting with Bill Carter, and asked him if they were really planning to keep him in Washington for a full year before reassigning him. He felt he was being punished for doing too good a job undercover in Colombia and getting so deeply involved, which had been essential to the success of his mission there. He had already been punished enough by Raul.

“Why don't you sit back and enjoy it while you're here?” Bill Carter responded. “There are a lot of things to do in Washington. You haven't taken any vacation time. Isn't there somewhere you want to go?” he asked pleasantly, as Marshall looked at him intently.

“Yes. Anywhere in Central or South America. Back to work. I have nothing to do here.” Bill had noticed and heard from others that Marshall had made no friends since he'd returned. He considered it a temporary assignment. He was a perfect chameleon when undercover, but had no idea how to be himself anymore. The only “himself” he knew was the right-hand man of one of the biggest drug dealers in South America. Being Special Agent Marshall Everett was now totally foreign to him. He had let his hair grow back to a buzz cut after he shaved it when he left Bogotá. Beards were discouraged at the Pentagon. He didn't even recognize the man he saw when he looked in the mirror without his long hair and beard, and his military surplus wardrobe.

He felt like he was living a lie every day, coming to work at a job he hated, with people he didn't care about or even want to know. What did he have in common with them? The men like him were all out in the field doing what he wanted to do, trying to break the chain of command and interrupt the activities of drug cartels. That at least seemed like important work. He was wasting his time at the desk job he'd been given, and even his superiors had to admit that his finely honed skills weren't being used.

“Let's see where you are by the end of the year,” Bill Carter said, trying to fob him off, but he had no foreign undercover assignment in mind for him for the moment. They didn't want him going back to wreak vengeance of a personal nature. He had to maintain a cool head and neutral point of view at all times. Bill wasn't fully convinced Marshall was capable of that anymore. He had lost too much and paid too high a price for the work that he loved. He wasn't objective, and wanted to engage in a vendetta his superiors didn't want him waging in the name of the DEA.

They were having a hard time evaluating him and figuring out where to send him that would make sense both for him and for the DEA, without jeopardizing himself or operations they had in progress. He had made no friends in Washington, and wasn't dating yet either. He hadn't gotten over the woman and child he had lost. Nothing in his current profile encouraged them to send him undercover again, but everyone agreed he was wasted where he was, and Marshall knew it too. He got more discouraged every day. He had already decided that if they didn't give him a new undercover assignment within the next year, he would leave the agency, but he had no idea what he would do then. All he knew how to do was what he had done for the DEA.

Bill Carter mentioned it over lunch with Jack Washington, his opposite number at the Secret Service, who was an old friend. They often asked each other's advice over knotty problems they were dealing with at work, although they were loyal to their respective agencies and the people who worked for them.

“I've got a guy who's rotting on the vine at a desk job in the Pentagon,” Bill told his Secret Service friend. “He's an incredibly talented undercover guy. We had him in Ecuador and Colombia for six years, and he got in too deep. There was a leak that made the decision easy, so we didn't blow the whole operation and get everyone killed. But I think we took him out too late. We only brought half of him home. His body is in Washington, but his heart and mind are still in the jungle south of Bogotá. He had a woman there—our target killed her hours after he left. And I'm watching this guy turn into a zombie. He's brilliant at what he does, but we all agree, he's still among the walking wounded, although he doesn't know it. I don't know what the devil to do with him.” It had been bothering him for months. They were wasting Marshall's talent.

“That's the trouble with you guys, you send them off to lead a supposedly real life in a false situation, they get to believe it, and they don't know who they are by the time you get them out. I've seen some really great guys get broken in mind and spirit that way. It's the nature of what you do, but it takes a hell of a toll on your boys, like military intelligence in a war zone. Those guys never come back whole.”

“Some do,” Bill said staunchly, but Jack Washington wasn't buying it. He'd seen the damage too often before. They were the casualties of the drug wars.

“Our guys risk their lives every day, but they've got their feet firmly planted on terra firma. They know who they are, who they're working for, and who they're defending. They don't go nuts trying to become something else, in a different culture, language, and country. Can you send him somewhere a little tamer?”

“I really don't have anything for him right now. He's been requesting Mexico, but I'm not convinced he'd be safe there either. And the psych team at his debriefing said he needed a year at home. The trouble is, this isn't home to him anymore. Home is a jungle camp with one of the biggest drug cartels in Colombia.”