Текст книги "Independence Day "

Автор книги: Ben Coes

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

2

THE CASTINE INN

MAIN STREET

CASTINE, MAINE

On the first Saturday of summer, at a little before eight in the morning, a crowd was gathered in front of the elegant, slightly dilapidated buttercup-colored Castine Inn. There were approximately two hundred men, women, and children, from infants in Baby Bjorns to grandparents clutching wooden canes, talking, laughing, catching up after the long winter, sipping coffee, hot chocolate, and cider, waiting. All were from Castine but one, the boyfriend of a Castine girl, a nice-looking fellow from San Francisco who’d come up with her for the weekend from Andover, in all likelihood unaware of the fact that his first visit to the pretty, remote, slightly ornery seaside town would feature a grueling six-and-a-half-mile race, and that he’d be expected to participate.

Thirty-three runners—thirteen men, twenty women—stood in the road behind a strip of yellow police tape, stretching, jogging in place, and getting ready for the race. They had on a motley assortment of shorts and T-shirts in a variety of colors and styles. The one unusual aspect to the group of runners was that no one wore running shoes. Everyone had on work boots.

At the back of the cluster of runners stood a big man off by himself. At six-four, he was the tallest in the group, and stocky. He had on beat-up Timberland boots, madras shorts, and a green T-shirt. His brown hair was long and looked like it hadn’t been brushed in weeks. His face was covered in a month’s worth of stubble. He leaned casually against the front bumper of a rusted light green Ford pickup truck.

At precisely eight o’clock, Doris Russell, Castine’s seventy-two-year-old mayor, stepped off the curb and into the road. Doris looked gentle, even matronly, but, as everyone knew, she possessed the wit, and the mouth, of a sailor. Doris waved her arms in the air, trying to get everyone’s attention. Gradually, silence settled over the crowd.

“Good morning, everyone,” said Doris in a high-pitched, slightly squeaky voice. She had a large smile on her face. “I hope you all had a wonderful winter.”

“It sucked,” someone shouted from the back of the crowd.

Laughter burst out from the throng of people.

“Who’s that?” Doris asked, peering into the crowd. “Is that Tom? Yeah, well, mine was a stinker too, Tom, if you want to know the truth. I broke my hip falling down the stairs and my granddaughter was expelled from Miss Porter’s. But thanks for asking.”

“He didn’t ask,” yelled someone else.

Another ripple of laughter spread through the crowd.

Doris shook her head, trying not to laugh.

“If you don’t let me get this thing started, we’ll be here all day. Which means, odds are, I’ll be dead.”

“We’ll miss you, Doris.”

Doris laughed, shaking her head, along with the rest of the crowd. Finally, she raised her hand.

“Well, anyway, as you all know, today is the first Saturday of our beloved Castine summer, and thank God for that. I’m so goddam sick of winter I could kill someone.”

“My wife would like to volunteer for that,” yelled someone.

Laughter once again erupted from the crowd.

“I’d want to be dead too if I was married to you, Burt,” said Doris. “Now, as I was saying, it being the first Saturday following the beginning of summer, it’s time once again for the annual Wadsworth Cove Marathon.”

Loud clapping and a chorus of enthusiastic cheers swept over the crowd.

*   *   *

Like many towns along the beautiful winding, rocky coast of Maine, Castine tolerated its summer visitors, the wealthy people from away, who came in June and left at Labor Day. But the long, hard, bitter-cold winter months were the province of the people who lived there year-round: the fishermen, teachers, nurses, construction workers, bus drivers, farmers, electricians, plumbers, police officers, doctors, a lawyer, and even a few artists.

Most towns in Maine had their own peculiar tradition to mark the end of winter, the season they’d all just suffered mightily through, mostly pent up inside their homes. In Castine, it was the Wadsworth Cove Marathon. The course was a punishing six and a half miles to the cove, then up a dirt path along Bog Brook to a large, well-known birch tree, then back to town. Running shoes were not allowed, only work boots, symbolic of the fact that the race was meant for working people, not city slickers, though technically anyone could run if they wanted to.

This year, an unusually large crowd was gathered to watch the race. A celebrity was in town. Not a celebrity in the traditional sense, just a kid from town whom everyone knew—the thirty-nine-year-old kid with the mess of brown hair.

“Now, as many of you know, this is the twenty-fifth running of the Wadsworth Cove Marathon,” said Doris. “I can remember the very first race. It was that New York city slicker Jed Sewall’s idea. Jed’s son was the captain of the Harvard University cross-country team at the time.”

“Yale,” someone yelled.

“What?” asked Doris.

“Yale. He went to Yale.”

“Oh, for chrissakes, Harvard, Yale, it doesn’t make a goddam bit of difference as far as I’m concerned,” said Doris, shaking her head. “They’re both asshole factories. Give me a Maine Maritime Academy man and a glass of gin and I’ll be perfectly happy. Anyway, the point of the story is, Jed concocted this cockamamie race so Jed Junior could beat everyone in town.”

A low wave of hoots and hollers echoed from the back of the crowd.

Doris paused, smiling as she worked the crowd into a lather.

“Of course, Jed hadn’t considered the fact that a certain fourteen-year-old Castine kid might decide to enter the race!” Doris yelled.

A chorus of cheers erupted from the crowd. A few people even shouted out his name: “Dewey! Dewey!”

“A kid who, I’m happy to say, is back here twenty-five years later, and, from what I’ve heard, is prepared to defend his title.”

Doris raised her hand and pointed at the man leaning against the pickup truck. He didn’t move, in fact, he didn’t seem to be listening.

*   *   *

Dewey Andreas was Castine’s son, as much a part of the town’s fabric as the hard, wind-swept place was part of him.

He was born in the three-room Castine hospital, delivered by Doris Russell’s late husband, Bob. He was raised on a pretty rambling farm called Margaret Hill, up a winding dirt road behind the golf course. He was a boy like any other boy in town until that one day everyone saw Dewey wasn’t like every other boy in town. He was eight years old at the time. The occasion was the annual Independence Day picnic at the Castine Golf Club, attended by everyone in town along with all of the summer folks.

Dewey was playing tennis, barefoot, with his older brother, Hobey. At some point, one of the summer kids, a prep schooler named Hampton, told the Andreas brothers to get off the court. They weren’t supposed to be playing in bare feet. When Hobey told the older boy to wait his turn, he’d called Hobey a “townie.”

What happened next on the green-grassed #2 tennis court lives on in Castine infamy. Dewey charged over and slammed the fifteen-year-old in the chest, knocking the taller boy over. When Hampton stood up, he lurched at Dewey, taking a big swing at his head. But Dewey ducked. Then he punched Hampton in the nose. Hampton dropped to the court, screaming in agony, as blood gushed from his nostrils. But Dewey wasn’t done with him. As horrified onlookers watched from the terrace, Dewey jumped on him, straddling him, then punched him over and over, beating the living crap out of him, stopping only when a combination of Hobey and their father, John Andreas, was able to pull him away from the bloody, bawling St. Paul’s freshman.

From then on, it wasn’t considered a wise move to fuck with the younger Andreas brother, the one with the mop of uncut, unmanageable brown hair, the kid who liked to ride his horse to school, the handsome, quiet one with the blue eyes as cold as stone. It wasn’t that people were embarrassed that day Dewey beat up Hampton. It was the opposite. Dewey had stood up for his brother and, by extension, his town.

They watched him grow up. By the time he was in sixth grade, he was six feet tall and had the gaunt, sinewy physique of an athlete. He had few friends, choosing mainly to hang out with his brother. Those friends he did have had been selected largely based on their interest in shooting things and by a shared dislike of talking, girls, and summer people.

By high school, he was six-four, two hundred pounds, and had the posture and gait of a prizefighter. After breaking every high school football scoring record in the state, Dewey ventured south to Boston College to carry the ball for the BC Eagles.

To say the town of Castine was proud of Dewey would’ve been an understatement. Every fall, twice a season, a bus was rented to ferry a crowd down to Chestnut Hill to watch BC’s hard-nosed 225-pound tailback tear through every defensive line in the Big East.

After college, Dewey returned to Castine long enough to steal away the prettiest girl in town, Holly Bourne, daughter of a professor at Maine Maritime Academy. Everyone in town went to the wedding. By then, Dewey was getting ready to try out for the U.S. Army Rangers. His hair was short. That was when some people started to recognize that Dewey’s aloofness, his standoffish demeanor, his confidence, the meanness in his eyes, the hint of savageness in his stride, that all of it had been given to him for a reason. No one was surprised when Dewey graduated first in his Ranger class out of 188 recruits.

There were tough people in Castine. There were tough people in Maine. And then there was Dewey.

When he left Rangers for Delta, people stopped gossiping altogether. It was no longer about pride. Dewey, they all knew, was being groomed to be one of America’s most elite soldiers. Not only was he serving his country, he was being trained to be part of America’s jagged front edge, the place where secrets were killed for, in cities no one had ever heard of, where nations clashed in the fog-shrouded dark of night. Dewey was in the middle of it all. He was in the maelstrom. A palpable sense of intrigue was always there, even when he wasn’t anywhere near the town.

The few times he came home with Holly and their toddler, Robbie, what had been a quiet, laconic nature became distant. Dewey’s silence told of a world the people in Castine would never know, a world Dewey didn’t want them to know, not because he didn’t like the people in town—because he loved them.

Where I’m going, you cannot come. I’m going there so you don’t have to.

Castine’s pride turned into something deeper then. Something quieter. When Dewey would return, on those rare occasions, back from an operation, his arrival was noted but not discussed. He was, they all knew, engaged in activities on behalf of the U.S. government that could never be talked of. Dewey, their Dewey, was at the bloodstained front edge of America’s covert war on terror. He was the razor’s edge, the tip of the spear, the hunter. It all made sense then, the toughness, the fierceness, the inability to be stopped, to feel pain.

And then, like a lightning bolt thrown from a cruel sky, it was all destroyed. Leukemia stole Robbie at age six. The town gathered at the cemetery, speechless and numb, to help Dewey and Holly bury their boy. A month later, Holly was found dead in an apartment near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and Dewey was accused of murdering her. The town’s grief turned bitter. Its character was shaken to its core. Yet instead of destroying the town, the tragedy brought everyone together. There was never a moment of doubt. Dewey could never do such a thing. Every family in town donated money so that Dewey could hire a good lawyer, a gesture he appreciated but refused to accept. In fact, he didn’t hire a lawyer, despite the fact that he faced the death penalty. He represented himself, standing alone against a well-heeled prosecution, and told the truth. He stood tall, just as he’d done so many years before, back on the tennis court.

When he was acquitted after only thirty-one minutes of deliberations, it was the coda to a terrible chain of events that had physically and emotionally exhausted the entire town. No one talked about Dewey after that. They all knew he fled the United States, but no one asked where he was going or what he was doing. They let him be. His parents, John and Margaret, aged. They left Margaret Hill only on rare occasions. Hobey moved to Blue Hill. A decade passed, with vague rumors about Dewey working on offshore oil platforms in faraway countries, and that was all.

And then he returned. It was a week after the greatest terror attack on American soil since 9/11, crafted by the Lebanese terrorist Alexander Fortuna. Maine’s largest employer, Bath Iron Works, had been destroyed in the attack. But someone had stopped the terrorist, though no one knew who. Several news reports mentioned a roughneck—an oil worker—with a military background, though the government refused to comment. Yes, that was when Dewey came back, and no one dared ask him if he was the one. They didn’t have to.

Now he was back again. Everyone knew why. It had been in the news for weeks. Dewey’s fiancée, Jessica Tanzer, the national security advisor to the president of the United States, had been killed in Argentina. Dewey had returned that fall, shell-shocked and broken. Most people assumed he’d leave after a few days, but days turned into weeks, then months, and it was then when people in Castine started to comprehend the fact that perhaps Dewey wasn’t ever leaving again. Perhaps this time, something had finally gotten to him. He’d survived the death of Robbie, then Holly, but Jessica’s killing had struck a blow that he didn’t seem to be able to recover from. The proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back.

*   *   *

As Doris pointed to Dewey, a cacophony of clapping and cheers came from the crowd.

“Hey, Dewey, you gonna win it this year?” yelled someone.

From the front of the pickup, Dewey turned but didn’t answer.

“Talkative as ever, eh, Dewey?” someone else yelled.

A few laughs rippled out from the crowd. Dewey glanced in the direction of the remark, remaining silent.

“Hey, Dewey, how’s that new talk show of yours coming along?” someone shouted from the back.

At this, Dewey’s lips spread into a smile. He glanced in the direction of the remark.

“I got him to smile!”

Dewey started laughing.

“I wasn’t smiling at you, Uncle Bill,” said Dewey.

“What were you smiling at, then?”

“I was thinking about the time we went duck hunting and you shot yourself in the foot.”

More laughter erupted.

“That was an accident, goddammit.”

“Sure it was,” said Dewey.

“No hurtin’ anyone if you don’t win, Dewey!” came another voice.

More laughter this time.

“Now, leave the boy alone,” said Doris, holding up her hand. “Was that Dickie? I don’t see your fat ass out there, Dickie.”

“That ain’t fat, that’s one hundred percent muscle, and stop staring at it.”

“Richard Pye, the only muscle you got left is the one you use to keep your money hidden at the bottom of those Grand Canyon pockets of yours.”

“I got five dollars right here for whoever wins this here race, Mayor,” said Pye, holding up a five-dollar bill for the crowd to see.

“Look at that,” said Doris. “Abe Lincoln is squinting because he hasn’t seen the sun in so long.”

*   *   *

As Dewey listened to the banter, he leaned forward, off the bumper of the truck, then walked to his niece, Reagan, who was standing next to her boyfriend.

“Can you beat her, Will?”

Will smiled and shook his head.

“No way,” he said. “She’s the fastest runner at Andover, boy or girl.”

“Prettiest too, right?” added Dewey, smiling and patting Reagan’s shoulder.

“That goes without saying,” said Will.

Reagan scowled and looked at Dewey, then her boyfriend.

“I know what you two jerks are trying to do, and it’s not going to work,” she said. “I’m not going to be distracted. Will, I will definitely destroy you. You’re the one I’m worried about, Uncle Dewey.”

“What’s your best mile?” asked Dewey.

“Four fifty-five.”

“You’ll beat me,” said Dewey. “I won’t even get to State Street by four fifty-five.”

“It’s not going to work. You can’t hustle me. I see through you.”

“Then again, running in boots is a little different,” said Dewey, ignoring her. “Starts to hurt a little. It’s the skin on the back of your foot that goes first. Scrapes right off. Then comes blood. Gets a little muddy in there.”

“Ewww,” said Reagan.

“Yeah, it’s nasty,” continued Dewey. “Like pea soup. Only it ain’t pea soup, know what I mean?”

Reagan glanced down unconsciously at her feet.

“I bandaged them.”

“Oh, then you should be fine,” said Dewey. “Bandages never fall off.”

“You should also point out the extra weight, Dewey,” said Will, smiling as he pitched in. “These boots are heavy.”

“Excellent point, William,” said Dewey, nodding. “That extra weight’ll make your legs get all muscly and big, like an Amazon lady. Will, what do you think, are guys into girls with big, thick tree trunk legs these days?”

Dewey and Will were now doubled over in laughter. Reagan seethed with a mixture of anger and annoyance, though a small grin did manage to sneak through.

“Look, I usually don’t talk like this, so please forgive me in advance,” said Reagan, “but fuck off, both of you. I hope the dust I kick up will settle down by the time your lame asses come crawling along behind me.”

She stormed off, shaking her head.

Just then, Doris Russell let out a loud whistle.

“Let’s get this shindig going,” Doris said loudly. “It’s time for this race to start. I got eleven people coming for dinner and I don’t even know what the hell I’m going to make.”

“Trust me, Doris, no one comes to your house for the food,” yelled someone from the back.

“Good luck getting that lobster license, Lincoln,” said Doris, grabbing the police tape and preparing to yank it out of the way. “Now, on your mark…”

The runners crowded up toward the tape, except for Dewey, who remained a few feet behind everyone else.

“Get set…” she continued.

“Wait!” came a voice from up the road. “Wait for me!”

Doris waved her arms, stopping the countdown.

Over the crest of the hill, a boy came sprinting down Main Street. He was shirtless. His face was painted black and green in some sort of hellish-looking camouflage. He wore Nantucket red cutoff shorts and was barefoot. He was holding a boot in each hand, though one was long and orange, the other short and brown.

A smile spread across Dewey’s face. He looked in Reagan’s direction. She was shaking her head.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she muttered.

The sight of thirteen-year-old Sam Andreas, charging down Main Street, elicited laughter, a few cheers, and some clapping, though most people just watched the kid in silent amusement.

He barreled down the last few yards to the starting line.

“Sorry, Aunt Doris,” said Sam, panting as he came close. He shot his older sister a demonic stare as he sat down on the curb to put on his boots. “Reagan hid my boots.”

“I did not,” said Reagan.

“Yeah, right,” he said. “Which is why I gotta wear these stupid things.”

Sam pulled a bright orange knee-high rubber boot onto his left foot. Then he pulled a worn-out L.L. Bean hunting boot onto his right foot.

“I don’t even know who these belong to, for chrissakes.”

“Watch your language, Sam,” came a voice from the crowd.

“Sorry, Grandma,” said Sam. “I didn’t know you was back there.”

“Were back there,” corrected Margaret Andreas. “And even if I wasn’t, young man, you do not have license to use the Lord’s name in vain.”

“I know,” he said, eyeing Reagan with a huge grin on his face. “I apologize.”

Sam finished tying his boot and stood up. He ducked under the tape and walked up to Reagan. He stood in front of her. He was at least half a foot shorter than her. His blue eyes stared out from the dark camouflage.

“Good luck out there, sis,” he whispered derisively. “You’re about to learn what it feels like to lose to a thirteen-year-old wearing his grandma’s boots.”

“Actually, the Bean boot’s mine,” said Dewey.

Sam looked up. A smile creased his lips.

“Hey, Uncle Dewey,” he said, still eyeing his sister. “Thank God you’re here. I thought I wouldn’t have any competition.”

“Glad to be of service,” said Dewey as Reagan gave Sam the finger. “What’s with the makeup?”

Sam suddenly looked crestfallen.

“It’s camo,” said Sam. “I got it at the Army-Navy store in Brewer. What, you think … it doesn’t look good?”

“No, you’ll blend right in. If there are any Viet Cong in the woods, you’ll be fine.”

Doris clapped her hands, then whistled again.

“Okay, everyone, now that we seem to have the entire field of runners here, let’s get going. On your mark, get set, go!”

Doris ripped the tape down from in front of the runners and the tightly packed throng moved out, Reagan Andreas at the lead. The crowd was cheering as the runners moved up Main Street.

Dewey started in last place, at the back of the pack. He smiled at Doris as he ran by her.

“I’m rooting for you,” she said as he passed by.

As he crossed the starting line, Dewey’s eyes were drawn to the right, down a side street. Parked halfway down the block, tucked in behind a line of Subarus and pickup trucks, was a black sedan, its engine idling. A spike of warmth jabbed at the base of his spine, then shot through his body, a warmth he hadn’t felt in a long time. He scanned the sedan one extra moment, then turned back to the race.

*   *   *

The sedan was a heavily customized Cadillac CTS with tinted bulletproof windows, steel side paneling, an undermounted bomb plate, and low-profile steel-meshed escape tires. In the backseat sat a large, dark-haired man in a navy blue suit. On his lap were two sheets of paper. He studied the documents as he sipped from a coffee cup adorned with a red-and-yellow Tim Hortons logo.

Both documents were printed on the letterhead of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. SSCI was responsible for providing congressional oversight of the U.S. intelligence community, including the CIA, NSA, and an alphabet’s worth of other agencies. In this capacity, SSCI had the right to conduct whatever investigations it deemed appropriate in order to ensure the CIA was doing its job properly. The man was reading one such file: a top secret analysis of a CIA operative who some believed had gone “off the rails.” The two documents were actually different versions of the same document. One was heavily redacted; the other was the clean, unredacted version, obtained surreptitiously by the man through a contact on the staff of the committee.

Most CIA agents, when on assignment in foreign land, assumed a position at an embassy or other benign department of government, giving them official diplomatic immunity, or cover, thus protecting them from the harsh punishments typically handed down to captured spies. An official agent, if captured, was usually escorted to the border and kicked out of the country.

There also were those agents who ventured into enemy lands without diplomatic immunity, unprotected. It was called non-official cover. If captured, these agents faced severe criminal punishment, up to and including execution. They operated alone, across enemy lines, without a safety net. Inside Langley, they were nicknamed illegals. Officially, they were known as NOCs (pronounced “knocks”).

If infiltrated correctly, a NOC had more freedom to roam because he or she would not necessarily be on any government’s watch list, as embassy workers were. But the value in being unsuspected by enemy governments was only part of it. NOCs were the most lethal combatants America’s intelligence and military were capable of producing. NOCs were culled exclusively from CIA paramilitary, Delta, and Navy SEALs. The NOC was Langley’s most effective and most dangerous human weapon. Some had been trained to be NOCs. Others migrated there because there was nowhere else to go.

Unfortunately, NOCs were also the most likely agents to develop severe psychological problems, and when this did occur, the results were unpredictable, and sometimes catastrophic. NOCs had the highest suicide rate of any federal employees, by a wide margin. They had the second-highest divorce rate, trailing only members of Congress. Alcoholism, domestic abuse, and a variety of other lesser travails plagued NOCs. The problems tended to occur when they were nonoperational.

Much more worrisome was the threat of a NOC being recruited into an enemy intelligence service. In the past decade, it had occurred six times. In each case, Langley was faced with a hard dilemma: kill the NOC, or let him sell whatever secrets he could—usually tactical operation design parameters—to America’s enemies. In each case, the decision had been made to terminate.

The subject of the SSCI investigation was a NOC.

The man scanned the two documents for the umpteenth time, beginning with the redacted version:

U.S. SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE

Washington, D.C. 20510

FOCUS:

****** ****** ***

******* **** *****

SANCTION:

SSCI RK667P

AS PER ASSIGNEE: US SEN. FURR

**** ********

NOVEMBER 19

FIELD VISIT:

JANUARY 24–25

FEBRUARY 7–10

ASSIGN:

COVER BLACK WIDOW

****** *************** ************* ********

SITUATION:

**** **** IS A****** *** MALE SUSPECTED OF EXHIBITING TRAITS ASSOCIATED WITH POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER (PTSD). TRIGGERING EVENTS INCLUDE **** ******** ******* U.S. INTELLIGENCE OPERATION. ************* *********** **************** ************** ************** ************ *********** ****************** ********** ************ ************** ************ ************** ****************

CONCLUSION:

ANALYSIS INCOMPLETE

HUMINT INSUFFICIENT

REC:

WITHOUT PROPER THERAPIST/SUBJECT COMMUNICATION, SANCTION MUST BE DEEMED INCONCLUSIVE. ********* *********** ********************* *************** ************** *********** *************** ****************** *************** ************** ************** **************** ************* ********** ************* ****************** ************** ************ ************ ************ ***********

CITATION:

DR. EDWARD HALLOWELL

TS #9773921A

SUBMISSION:

SUDBURY, MA

MARCH 1

Next, he looked at the unredacted analysis:

U.S. SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE

Washington, D.C. 20510

FOCUS:

ANDREAS, DEWEY

NOC 295-R

SANCTION:

SSCI RK667P

AS PER ASSIGNEE: US SEN. FURR

PER DDCIA GANT

NOVEMBER 19

FIELD VISIT:

JANUARY 24–25

FEBRUARY 7–10

ASSIGN:

COVER BLACK WIDOW

DO NOT SHARE (PER DEP DIR GANT)

SITUATION:

ANDREAS IS A 39-YEAR-OLD MALE SUSPECTED OF EXHIBITING TRAITS ASSOCIATED WITH POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER (PTSD). TRIGGERING EVENTS INCLUDE DEATH OF FIANCÉE DUE TO U.S. INTELLIGENCE OPERATION. GIVEN POSSIBLE PAST SOCIOPATHIC TRAITS EXHIBITED BY SUBJECT, THIS OFFICE WAS ASKED TO DETERMINE IF ANDREAS REPRESENTS A SECURITY THREAT TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

CONCLUSION:

ANALYSIS INCOMPLETE

HUMINT INSUFFICIENT

REC:

WITHOUT PROPER THERAPIST/SUBJECT COMMUNICATION, SANCTION MUST BE DEEMED INCONCLUSIVE. HOWEVER, ANALYSIS OF ANDREAS PERSONAL, MILITARY, AND INTELLIGENCE HISTORY SUGGESTS A UNIQUELY CAPABLE ASSET WHOSE REHABILITATION SHOULD BE A TOP AGENCY PRIORITY. ALTERNATIVELY, THE SAME SKILLS THAT MAKE HIM A PRIORITY AGENCY ASSET ALSO MAKE HIM, UNREHABILITATED, A UNIQUELY DANGEROUS POTENTIAL ADVERSARY.

CITATION:

DR. EDWARD HALLOWELL

TS #9773921A

SUBMISSION:

SUDBURY, MA

MARCH 1

The man’s focus was interrupted by his driver.

“You think Andreas will win?” the man in the front seat asked, nodding toward the runners as they ran up Main Street.

The man in the backseat glanced up, meeting his eyes in the rearview mirror.

“No.”

*   *   *

By the time the pack of runners reached Bog Brook, marking the halfway point in the race, there were two people out in front, and the rest of the field was scattered about, far behind. Reagan was leading, and Dewey was just a few steps behind her. The two were both panting hard and drenched in perspiration.

Every time Reagan looked back at Dewey, he gave her a confident, relaxed smile, toying with her. He pounded the ground behind her as they ran down from the brook toward the road which, in a little over a mile, would conclude at the finish line.

At the outskirts of town, as the dirt path popped them out onto Battle Avenue, Dewey made his move, cutting to Reagan’s left. He knew that in order to beat her, he would have to pass her suddenly, and forcefully, at a pace that was dramatically quicker. To move on her in a gradual way would only spur her on.

By the time Dewey reached the small wooden sign marking the entrance to the Castine Golf Club, he was at least a hundred yards in front of Reagan.

His lungs burned. His legs ached as he pushed himself harder and harder. Dewey didn’t look back. The truth is, he didn’t want to see the look in Reagan’s eyes. Part of him felt guilty about beating her. As he turned onto Main Street for the final stretch, he could hear the crowd cheering in the distance. A smile came to his face as he pushed himself toward the finish line.

Dewey’s eyes suddenly shot left. It was a runner. Dewey hadn’t heard the approach, but it was why everyone was cheering, he now realized. He watched, helplessly, as the wiry, shirtless figure of his nephew Sam went whizzing past him, orange boot on his left foot, Bean boot on his right, his skinny arms pumping up and down as he almost seemed to take flight.

“Oh, shit,” muttered Dewey.

Dewey broke into a sprint, looking for the extra gear he realized he would need in order to catch up to his nephew. But it was futile. He could only watch as Sam coasted away from him. Sam seemed to pick up speed the closer he got to the finish line, as if he himself wasn’t fully aware of his own God-given swiftness.

The crowd was going nuts as Sam approached the yellow police tape marking the finish line. Dewey was at least twenty feet behind him. No one else was even in sight yet.

Just before the finish line, Sam stopped. He leaned over, in pain, catching his breath, as Dewey approached. Sam stood just in front of the line, waiting for Dewey.