"It's been five years."
Something in John's tone alerted Frank. He looked up to see the younger man frowning slightly, as if he were unhappy to learn that Niema Burdock was still single.
"Does she seem happy?"
"Happy?" Startled by the question, Frank leaned back, the chess game forgotten. "She's busy. She likes her work, she's very well paid, she has a nice home, drives a new car. I can take care of those things, but I can't direct or know her emotions." Of all the people for whom John was an anonymous guardian angel,
Niema Burdock was the one he followed the closest. Since he brought her out of Iran after her husband was killed, he had taken an almost personal interest in her well-being.
In a flash of intuition, a leap of reasoning that had made Frank Vinay so good at his job, he said, "You want her yourself." He seldom blurted out his thoughts in such an unguarded way, but he was, abruptly, as certain of this as he had ever been of anything. He felt faintly embarrassed at making such an observation.
John glanced up, eyebrows lifted quizzically. "Of course," he said, as if it were a given. "For all the good wanting does."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm scarcely in a position to become involved with anyone. Not only am I gone for months at a time, there's always a good chance I won't come back." He said it coolly, unemotionally. He knew exactly what the risks were in his profession, accepted them, perhaps even sought them.
"That's true of other professions: the elite military teams, certain construction workers. They marry, have families. I did."
""four circumstances were different."
Because Frank hadn't worked in black ops, he meant. John was a specialist in those missions that never saw the light of day, financed by funds for which there was no accounting, no records. He took care of what needed to be handled without the government becoming involved, to preserve deniability.
Frank had been considering broaching a subject with John, and now seemed like a perfect time. "Your circumstances can be different, too."
"Can they."
"I don't plan to die in harness; retirement is looking more and more attractive. You could step into my place without ever losing a beat."
"DDO?" John shook his head. "I operate in the field; you know that."
"And you know that you can operate wherever you choose. You're a natural for the job. In fact, you're better suited for it than I was when I took over. Think about it for a while-" The phone rang, interrupting him, and he broke off. The call wasn't unexpected. He lifted the receiver, spoke briefly, then hung up. "An agent is bringing the report over."
The chess game was forgotten, the real reason for their meeting taking over. Since Flight 183 went down the week before, the FBI and NTSB had been combing the rugged Carolina mountains collecting fragments, trying to piece together what had happened. Two hundred sixty-three people had died, and they wanted to know the reason. There hadn't been any unusual radio traffic; the flight had been routine, until the plane fell from the sky. The flight recorder had been found and preliminary reports said that the pilots hadn't indicated anything was wrong. Whatever had happened had been instant, and catastrophic-and therefore suspicious.
From one of his untold shadowy sources, John had heard whispers there was a new type of explosive device that airport X-ray machines couldn't detect, not even the CTX-5000 machines such as were used in Atlanta. He notified Frank, who quietly set about getting all the information available on Flight 183 as soon as NTSB and the FBI gathered it.
The crash site was difficult to work. The terrain was mountainous, heavily wooded, without easy access. The wreckage was strewn over an enormous area. Bits and pieces, both metal and human, had been found in treetops. Teams had been working nonstop for a week, first gathering the human remains and turning them over to forensic specialists for the almost impossible task of identification, then searching for even the smallest piece of the aircraft. The more pieces they found, the more complete the puzzle would be, and the more likely they were to discover what happened.
Fifteen minutes later an agent knocked on Vinay's door, rousing Kaiser. John remained in the library, out of sight, while Frank, with Kaiser beside him, collected the report.
Frank had requested two copies of the report, and on returning to the library he gave one to John. He sank back into his chair, his brow furrowed as he read. The report wasn't reassuring.
"Definitely an explosion. That wasn't really in doubt." People in the area had reported hearing an abrupt boom and seeing a bright flash. Whether or not anyone actually had seen anything was open to speculation, since the plane had gone down in the mountains where there wasn't a good line of sight in any direction. People generally didn't go around staring at the sky, though if the afternoon sun had glinted off the plane and caught someone's attention at just the right moment it was possible to have seen the actual explosion. More than likely, though, on hearing the noise, people had looked around, seen the smoke and arcing debris, and their imaginations took it from there and convinced them they had seen one hell of a fireball.
Rumors had immediately started that Flight 183 had been shot down by a missile. Congressman Donald Brookes, the House chairman of Foreign Relations, had been on Flight 183. Someone had to have wanted him dead for some reason, though all the reasons popping up on the Internet had been farfetched, to say the least. Proof of the plot, the missile theorists said, was that Congressman Brookes, who lived in Illinois, was reportedly going on vacation but for some reason was on a flight originating in Atlanta, instead of Chicago. That was obviously suspicious. Even after it was revealed that the Brookes's oldest son lived in Atlanta and they had visited him for a couple of days before leaving for Europe, the bring-down-a-plane-to-get-one-man theory persisted.