White: A Novel (20 page)

“Well, it’s impressive, whatever you call it,” Jeremy said. “What’s next?”

The major, who still had not introduced himself by name, pointed to the door.

“Briefings until after dinner, I’m afraid,” the major apologized. “Psychology, theology, microbiology, and organic chemistry . . . that sort of thing.”

He started toward the door, and Jeremy followed him. They walked downstairs, talking about time lines, Jeremy’s new identity, and why he had come to the Homestead. Like the total-immersion linguistics courses taught at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, this program demanded complete reliance on the undercover identity. From the time Jeremy had received his identity pack, his old persona had ceased to exist.

After a short walk outside, the major turned to what appeared to be an elegant London row house. The two men climbed up a flight of limestone stairs and entered through double doors to find a character right out of central casting.

“Jeremy Walker, meet Redbeard,” the major said.

Jeremy tried not to look shocked at the man in front of him. A long, tightly braided ponytail poked out from under a leather skullcap. ZZ Top facial hair cascaded down a white-on-black “Fuck Authority” T-shirt that looked full to bursting with the behemoth’s barrel chest. Tattoos covered both tree-trunk arms. Sterling studs poked through his septum, lower lip, and left ear. A bright red, green, and yellow serpent curled menacingly out the neck of his shirt and across his throat.

“Pleasure to meet you,” the man said. His voice sounded kind, respectful. “I’m all set up in the other room if you’re ready.”

“Ready for what?” Jeremy asked.

“Damn. Didn’t they tell you?” the man asked. He turned toward the major, but the officer simply smiled and left.

“Come on in here.”

The six-foot-six biker led Jeremy into a side room that had been decorated like the tea parlor in a proper Kensington bed and breakfast.

“Nobody told me anything,” Jeremy said. But then he saw the equipment and understood.

“Shoulda said something to a clean-cut guy like you.”

The giant sat down at a mahogany Edwardian card table.

“Scones?” Redbeard asked. Someone had taken the time to put out refreshments.

“You’re going to tattoo me?” Jeremy asked. The tea and crumpets barely registered.

“That’s what they told me.” Redbeard nodded. His bear-paw hands dwarfed the silver tea strainer as he poured hot water from a steaming porcelain pot. “You ever get inked up?”

Jeremy shook his head. He had done crazy things for his country, but so far none of them had left indelible marks.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Redbeard said. He poured black ink into a disposable plastic thimble and broke a ten-gauge outline needle out of a plastic autoclave sleeve. “But don’t worry, buddy; ain’t many people ever gonna see what I’m gonna give you. Sit down right there.”

Jeremy did as he was told.

Redbeard stretched plastic surgeon’s gloves onto his monstrous hands, then picked up a Q-tip.

“The downside is that this is gonna hurt.”

“I’ve got friends who have tattoos,” Jeremy said, trying to cover his doubt with bravado. “They said it wasn’t too bad.”

Redbeard reached out with his free hand and then raised the Q-tip.

“That may be, but ain’t none of ’em ever been through anything quite like this,” Redbeard said. The artist reached out toward his unmarked human canvas and Jeremy understood.

Oh my God,
he thought.
This guy can’t be serious.

“Don’t feel self-conscious about yelling,” the tattoo artist said, getting down to his unique expertise. “As a matter of fact, I’m gonna waive the no-cry rule.”

Jeremy heard the buzz of the tattoo needle.

“’Cause like I said”—Redbeard bit the sterling lip stud between his nicotine-stained teeth—“this motherfucker is gonna hurt.”

Book II

INSERTION

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

— Nietzsche

IX

Wednesday, 16 February

18:02 GMT

1701 Coopers Lane, Stafford, Virginia

CAROLINE WALLER LOVED
her husband. That had never been the problem. She’d willingly followed him into the FBI, giving up a well-paying job with the Department of Health and Human Services for a four-year excursion to the Ozarks. When it came right down to it, Caroline recalled, she had been the one to phone the Washington field office recruiter and request an application. All Jeremy had to do was fill in the blanks.

But that seemed like a long time ago as she sat at the top of a sledding hill watching a gaggle of neighborhood kids yelling and screaming in the joyous throes of a day off from school.

The nor’easter had dropped a record-setting twenty-eight inches of snow on Washington DC and its suburbs, shutting down everything from the Capitol to the Quantico Marine Corps Base and the FBI Academy. The timing couldn’t have been worse for a new president facing an awful string of terror attacks, but at this very moment that seemed far away and superfluous to Caroline and her three kids. As with many Virginia storms, the furious snows and winds had given way to bright sunshine and forty-five-degree skies. It was time to play.

“Hey, Mommy! Look at me!” Maddy called out.

Their only daughter had inherited her dad’s spirit of adventure. At the ripe old age of seven, she had already pleaded for a chance to go parachuting. Not content merely to ride her bike up and down the street, she had built a ramp and persuaded her younger brothers to let her jump over them. When the X Games came on ESPN, she decided to “board” a sterling-silver tea tray—a wedding gift from Jeremy’s parents—down the staircase. Fortunately for Maddy, the tray had suffered the worst of the crash, leaving her bent but not broken.

“Sorry, Mommy,” the little girl had cried, lying in a heap on the landing. “I tried to get technical and ended up in a total yard sale.”

“Hold on to your brother!” Caroline called out. Christopher, their middle child, could hurt himself brushing his teeth. Just a week earlier, she’d run him to the emergency room after a close call with a dresser. On a dare from his sister, he’d tried using the drawers as a ladder to reach his piggy bank. The resulting crash cost him four stitches above his left eye and her ten years off an already stress-shortened life.

“Where’s Daddy?” Patrick asked, panting deeply while he waited for his turn on the sled.

“He’s busy saving the world, honey,” Caroline said. It was a line she used all the time now.

“When is he coming home?”

“As soon as the world’s safe, silly.”

“Just like Johnny Rocket, right?” the little boy asked.

“I’d say more like Power Rangers,” Caroline replied. She often relied on the Cartoon Network to illustrate complicated points. In the age of Tipping Point marketing, child psychology came down to knowing which action hero to cite in building a frame of reference.

“Patrick, zip up your coat before you freeze blue,” she added, bending over to brush the snow off his sweater. “If you want to stay out here, you’re . . .”

“Mama! Christopher’s crying!” Maddy called out from the bottom of the hill.

Caroline looked down the hill to where Maddy stood over her little brother, tugging on the sled rope and trying to pull it out from under his prostrate body.

She hurried down the slope, past a mob of older neighborhood kids who had barely even noticed.

“Get offa my sled!” Maddy scolded her brother, who was hollering earnestly now, holding his breath between sobs. Caroline counted seven seconds between bleats and knew it must be serious. Anything more than a three-second breath hold usually meant trouble.

“Leave the sled alone,” Caroline called out. Where the hell was Jeremy, anyway? The last she had heard from him was an answering machine message in her office.

“Something came up,” he’d said, relying on the same three-word excuse he used to explain every disappearance.
Something came up
never shed any light on where he was going or when he’d be back. She never knew anything about the missions—how dangerous they’d be, whether they’d take him outside the country, whether they’d render him insufferable among the raging mood swings.

“It’s all right, sweetie; Mommy’s here,” Caroline cooed, trying to calm the injured little boy.

“I think it’s his arm, Mom,” Maddy said. Doctoring had never been one of her aspirations, but she knew plenty about crashing.

“Is it your arm?” Caroline asked.

“I . . . think . . . it’s . . . broke . . . Mom . . . ,” the little boy managed to say between lung-clearing sobs.

Damn the FBI,
Caroline thought to herself, kneeling down over her son, reaching into his snowsuit for signs of trouble.
The Bureau has ten thousand agents they can call on to fight their war on terror. Why does it always have to be my husband?

JORDAN MITCHELL LOVED
the Berkshires for their peace. Having spent most of his professional life in New York, he relished the quiet passage of seasons, the way Mother Nature moved relentlessly on in spite of man and all his efforts to harness her. He’d never been a religious man, but he understood some greater power in the first buds of spring, the way frost glistened in a morning sun, the last calls of geese flying south.

Neighbors might have argued that Mitchell’s Bell Jet Ranger he-licopter seemed somewhat incongruous to their Norman Rockwell idyll, but that would imply he had neighbors. And he didn’t. Mitchell’s South Egremont estate—a stone great house and outbuilding cluster called Longpath—covered nearly seven hundred acres. The nearest house stood almost a mile away.

“Your lunch, Mr. Mitchell,” the housekeeper announced, toting a wooden tray of salmon over watercress with pine nuts and couscous. The Borders Atlantic CEO always ate more heartily at Longpath, where he felt infused with vigor.

“Thank you, Mrs. Hartung.” Mitchell looked up from the new Alexander Calder biography and pointed toward the corner of his desk. Rich sunlight poured in through windows whose leaded glass had sagged with age.

The stiff, heavyset woman set the tray down and shuffled out. Anna Hartung and her husband, Gerhardt, had lived and worked more than forty years at Longpath. Mitchell’s father had hired them right off a merchant ship from Argentina. Any suggestions that they might have been hiding from a darker past would have fallen on deaf ears. The Mitchell patriarch valued allegiance over all else, and Nazis were known for that.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Mitchell,” Trask said, nodding to the housekeeper as he entered. The old woman shuffled right on by, not interested in a newer generation of servants.

“Is it?” Mitchell asked, laying down his book. “I’ve been too busy to notice.”

“So have I, for that matter,” Trask replied. He knew when Mitchell would tolerate retort and when he wouldn’t. “Thought you might want to see what I’ve been up to.”

Mitchell knew, of course. He had heard the helicopter arrive half an hour earlier. His only question was why Trask hadn’t arrived sooner.

“Well, open it, then!” Mitchell barked. Though hungry, he had completely forgotten about the rapidly cooling repast.

The chief of staff carried a brightly polished mahogany box, inlaid with fruitwoods, white gold, and birch. A large circle in the middle of the top bore elaborate engravings, including the initials AWH.

“The box alone is worth the trouble,” Trask said, twisting the case in filtered sunlight and watching the wood grains dance. “It’s magnificent.”

But Mitchell had no interest in the box, and Trask knew it. He lifted the top to expose .56 caliber English horseman’s pistols—two pristine examples of eighteenth-century European gunsmithing, cut from black walnut and turned Damascus steel.

“Magnificent,” Mitchell gasped. He held them in his gaze for a long breath before reaching out to handle them.

What Trask had delivered were the very weapons Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr had used to settle a dispute over honor. On July 11, 1804, the two political enemies faced each other on the dueling ground in Weehawken, New Jersey. One of these pistols had ended Hamilton’s life and Burr’s career in office. Now both of them had found their way to Mitchell.

“Now to answer a question I’ve always wanted to find out for myself,” Mitchell said. “Which one is it?”

“The one on top,” Trask answered. “That’s what the family says. There’s no way to be certain, unfortunately, because the weapons have been outside the family for almost four decades.”

Mitchell knew their provenance. After more than 160 years, a descendant had sold them to Chase Manhattan Bank. The Borders Atlantic CEO had leveraged the sale only after considerable effort.

“How many times do you think someone has pulled this trigger since that fateful day?” Mitchell asked. He lifted the stout weapon from its red-velvet resting spot.

“The family says they never did,” Trask told him. “And I doubt the corporate owners ever did.”

Mitchell paid meticulous attention to the history of the weapons he bought. Guns only interested him if they came with a story.

“So it was the other that killed Philip,” Mitchell said. Hamilton’s nineteen-year-old son had been shot down in an 1801 duel with the same set of pistols. Family lore held that the man on the ten-dollar bill had not wanted to take a chance on dying by the same barrel, so he chose it against Burr.

Mitchell held the pistol in his hands for a minute, turning it back and forth to drink in every visual detail. He raised it to his nose and inhaled, trying to detect remnants of the powder or lead ball.

“Present!” Mitchell called out the words Hamilton’s second had uttered that fateful morning. He pointed the gun toward the window—his own father had demanded great attention to firearms safety—and pulled back the hammer.

They stood just ten paces from each other,
the executive thought.
Close enough to spit. Hamilton’s heart must have been racing as he raised his gun hand, then settled it on his adversary’s heart. Could he hear the echo of the shot that had taken his Philip on that very spot? Did he expect death to come for him? Did he really intend to miss on the first shot as he had told his son an honorable man would do?