The Perfect Candidate: A Lance Priest / Preacher Thriller (No. 1) (38 page)
Read The Perfect Candidate: A Lance Priest / Preacher Thriller (No. 1) Online
Authors: Christopher Metcalf
“Everyone aboard and accounted for?” Seibel’s mood had lifted after the bird took off. He was watching through his binoculars, smiling.
Fuchs let the question hang there for a moment, with his Bavarian accent back in place he answered. “All but one.”
“What, who did we lose?”
“We didn’t lose anyone. One of us decided to take another way home.”
Seibel now let that hang for a moment. “Why did you let him go?”
“Was I supposed to shoot him?” Fuchs answered.
“You know what I mean. You should have convinced him.”
“He picked a most inopportune moment to take his leave. Right in the middle of our little jog just now. He simply turned and walked away. Nothing I could do.” Fuchs closed his eyes, exhausted.
“I know, I know. He’s done this throughout his life. Did it back in high school the first time. Had his parents worried to death. Always needs to prove something to himself.” Seibel shook his head.
“Just like you now, huh?” Fuchs joked.
“Right.”
“Do you want me to go back in and track him?” Fuchs asked.
“That’d be useless. He just disappears. Becomes someone else. Quite amazing really.” Seibel turned from the window to look at Marta lying on the bed in the darkened room.
“Quite a pain in the ass if you ask me.” Fuchs added.
“That too. I’ll see you back in Riyadh. Out.”
“Out.” Fuchs took off the helmet and handed it to the co-pilot. He turned back to Tarwanah and Jamaani. They all smiled. You can’t hear a word in a Black Hawk flying at top speed with the doors open. The three of them just looked at each other each knowing full well what was behind the shared smiles. Tarwanah turned away to look into the empty night sky. He hummed to himself the song Lance had sung for him this morning.
In Edmond, 1984, it was a single mother of two very young boys. In Dallas, 1985, it was a divorcee who needed someone to listen to her. In San Francisco, 1988, it was a poster shop owner who loved to talk about her cats. In Oklahoma City, Wichita, Orlando, Chicago, New York, London, Paris and Berlin it always followed this model.
Each time, it was a female or females. Probably something psychological about that, but nonetheless, it was a proven method. Dive into unfamiliar communities and cultures; meet someone in need; tell them the most wonderful yet utterly believable lies. Sometimes it lasted a few hours. Other times, these detours from reality lasted days. There was always a sexual dynamic even if no intimacy was shared.
He’d perfected his false selves during these excursions and become comfortable living lives not his own. Yet, a streak of modest chivalry ran through each of these untold tales. At no time did he hurt his benefactors. Often, he helped much more than he was helped. His aid included dislodging bad boyfriends, encouraging ex-husbands to move out of town and straightening out irrational bosses.
He took no money, other than that used to purchase food or transportation. He never stole, either cash or hearts. He always made it clear from the moment they met that he would not be staying long. Their time together would be brief but memorable.
In Baghdad, 1991, it was two sisters forced home from college by the impending assault by America. With two bullets and shrapnel in him and bombs raining down from the sky, Lance became Amad, the eldest son of a Saudi leather goods trader. He had traveled to Baghdad to negotiate with a new trading partner but had the misfortune of walking into a robbery.
He couldn’t go into details because of police corruption he had witnessed the night before, but he could confirm that two of the robbers would never steal again. The others took his money and identification and shot him. But he had been able to escape death. Amad had lost a lot of blood and was in terrible shape the next morning as he told the girls his tale outside a market. He looked even worse than he felt.
The two sisters took the injured hero to their uncle Hamid. He was an Oxford-trained surgeon who had a booming black market business because he had to practice in secret due to his political views falling on the wrong side of Saddam’s Bathe party.
The surgeon took an immediate liking to Amad, especially his love of running. The uncle had run long distance at Oxford and would’ve loved to compete for the Iraqi national team at the Olympics, but again his politics were wrong.
Amad was welcomed into and recovered in the sisters’ home for the next few weeks. The sisters’ parents were easily convinced. While there, he was able to fix a persistently leaky faucet and persuade a rowdy upstairs neighbor to turn his music down after 10 p.m. The sisters’ father considered Amad a gift from Allah and hoped he could stay for an extended period, at least while the bombs fell.
Amad had to fend off very personal healing assistance from the sisters. They offered daily to soothe him, but he feigned weakness from his injuries. He was clear with both that he could not and would not be staying long.
The downtime recuperating allowed Lance to do something else he hadn’t done in a good long time. He’d lie there at night and just think, go into a deep trance. During this particular stint of deep thought, he tried to focus on one person -- Geoffrey Seibel. Problem was, he kept seeing another face. Marta would not leave him alone.
He’d been wrong about Seibel. Been guilty of underestimating his boss, his master. Lance had always been able to hold his own with others because of his ability to master encyclopedic, geographic and other assorted bits of knowledge. He, by his very nature, understood nuances and body language and could always dig into someone’s psyche without too much effort. He thought he’d done this sufficiently well with Seibel.
He was sadly mistaken.
Lying there late into the night seeing Seibel in his mind’s eye and rolling him over and over, he could see there were blind spots everywhere. Seibel kept more hidden than he revealed; much more.
Fuchs, Marta, fake nukes, hunting Saddam; it was all measured and mixed and created by Seibel. Lance realized he was a small cog, more than a piece of dust, but nonetheless, a tiny part in the intricate machine that Seibel had built and labored over for 30 years.
A disembodied Lance looked at himself lying in this bed in this small, quiet room. He moved up to widen the frame. It took complete focus, but he could see Seibel’s compartmentalized world below.
As he pulled back further, he saw more and more rooms; hundreds, maybe thousands of them. Seibel had created a labyrinth with twists and turns and levels and layers and overlapping dimensions that expanded out and collapsed upon others. It was a multi-dimensional puzzle box. It was a web.
He wanted to be a much bigger player in Seibel’s game. Whatever it was. Lance wanted to know more and see if he couldn’t influence the outcome or even better, change the machine’s parts and redesign the labyrinth just enough to make it his own.
It was selfish, but that is just Lance. Maybe it was nothing more than selfishness driving him. Maybe.
Lance had never stopped to ask himself about his motivation and he wasn’t going to start now. He needed a challenge. It was that simple.
Truth be told, another vision took up a significant portion of his time now. Marta.
Her eyes, when they first met his, brought a new sensation that had infected him. The kiss they shared was also unlike any he had experienced. Granted, he’d never kissed a woman a few minutes after shooting her.
Her eyes and face and mouth haunted him in brief moments when he closed his eyes or turned his head or breathed.
By the third week, Preacher had healed considerably. The surgery and stitching done by the black market surgeon were excellent No infections and no need for follow-up care. The household had come to depend on him, perhaps a little too much. When the sisters’ mother intoned one morning that she and he would be alone that afternoon and she had a project that could use his special skills, Amad knew it was time to go.
This time had been different though. Instead of working for himself and a personal goal, Lance had been working the angles; doing the critical intelligence collection thing. He had learned from the sisters, their father, their uncle and family friends how the local network of corruption and skullduggery worked. He had identified the real power players controlling the neighborhood and the identities of those who controlled the neighborhood leaders.
Lance had learned in three weeks what may have taken a year for a network of eight or maybe 10 players. He knew the power broker for the southeast quadrant of Baghdad. Over tea on the floor in the family’s living room, a member of the Baghdad inner circle had even bragged that he had direct contact with Saddam. People were willing to share the most amazing things with Amad. He just had that effect on others.
With a wealth of information memorized, Amad told the sisters and their mother he was going out for a walk and would be back before lunch. He walked out the door never to return. Fifteen minutes later, he was on a bus headed for the outskirts of town. An hour after that, he caught a ride on a ramshackle and overloaded truck headed west for the Jordanian border. Getting there was challenging with most bridges blown apart by US bombs.
Two days later, he walked 18 miles around the Iraq-Jordan highway border crossing. And a day after that, he walked down a pleasant street in a quiet and quaint neighborhood in Amman, Jordan.
He knocked on a blue door. The door opened and out stepped Tarwanah. He could only smile and hug the ragged desert rat on his doorstep.
Four days later, a clean-shaven and very tan Corporal Priest walked onto base in Augsburg with only a slight limp evident. He spent the day listening to an array of Iraqi military conversations. They were all delightfully boring and told the same story – an endless barrage of US bombs had paralyzed the Iraqi military. Operation Desert Storm, with its precision missile strikes, had been remarkably successful.
That evening, Corporal Priest strolled the three quarters of a mile home to his apartment. As he fully expected, a couple of visitors waited for him.
Seibel sat at the table drinking a cup of coffee. Fuchs was in the kitchen scrounging up a meager dinner with the sparse options available. Lance joined Seibel at the table.
“Nice vacation?” Seibel smiled as he put the coffee cup down.
“Nice enough.”
“I read your report. Very thorough, but completely lacking any details on your actual whereabouts.” Seibel added.
“Baghdad.” Lance smiled. Fuchs chuckled in the kitchen.
“That I believe.” Seibel sighed as he brought his hands to his face and fingers through his hair. He had obviously come straight from the airport. “Baghdad.”
“My sources are credible, but need to remain confidential to protect their identities.” Lance added.
Seibel turned away and stretched out his feet. “If I had to guess, you most likely befriended a young female and worked your way into staying in her house, with her parents’ blessing, of course. You received medical care on the black market. You earned the respect and trust of the girl’s parents while earning the intimate affection of the girl. All the while picking up details from people who came into their lives on a daily basis.”
Now Lance leaned back and stretched out his legs. “That sounds like a nice plan. Good model to work from.”
“Your model, proven time and time again since you were 17.”
“16.” Lance corrected.
Fuchs walked in with a box of crackers and joined them at the table.
“I don’t think we are going to get a lot of detail out of our boy here. We just need to work his intel and see where it gets us.” Fuchs was playing good cop to Seibel’s pissed off investigator.
“Oh, we’ll work the intel, no question. It’s good stuff. But I just wonder what we are going to do with our little head case here. Mr. ‘play by his own rules.’”
“You knew what you were getting with me.” Lance was calm, non-confrontational.
“You knew what you were signing up for. You were told time and again by me and others that sacrifice was the first thing we do. Being team players is the second. You were given ample opportunity to back out of this.”
“Yeah, right. When was that, after you sent two guys to track and kill me in Dallas? Maybe at Harvey Point? Or maybe when I shot one of your deep resources in that apartment in Baghdad? Just walk away anytime?” Lance pursed his lips and shook his head.
“You had the opportunity to say no before you got in the car in DC. But you weren’t about to walk away. You saw the opportunity to be a part of something that gave you the chance to lie and kill for a living. That was it plain and simple.”
“Lie and kill?”
“Plain and simple.”
Lance turned to Fuchs. “Is that why you signed up?”
“Can’t remember, really.” Fuchs kept his smile and German accent intact.
“I would think that a few years later you would know a little more about me. Killing was never the reason I got in that car and joined your little traveling circus.” Lance had an authentic look of disappointment on his face. “I’ve done what was necessary each step of the way. Done just what you taught me. A few people got killed in the process. I guess taking lives just comes natural for some of us.” He looked at both of them. There were only killers sitting at the table.
Seibel decided to stand. He stretched again and took a few steps -- a professor about to lecture. “So, what role is this you’re playing now? You sit there calm and assured; satisfied that you have produced valuable intelligence. But I can see what is really going on. All over your face.”
“And that is?”
“Why me? What do you really want old man? Why the hell didn’t you tell me the truth about Baghdad?”
“All that, here on my face?” Lance drew a circle around his face like a mime.
“All that and more.” Seibel added.
Lance turned to Fuchs again. “Right here on my face, that easy?”
“I think our fearless leader can see more than I can, more than others.” Fuchs raised his eyebrows.
“So get to it. Tell me what I’m thinking.” Lance turned back to Seibel.
“Nope. No answers from me. You knew coming in that my methods serve a purpose that you aren’t privy to.” The CIA master shook his head.
“Yah, I knew that. But I didn’t know you were going to send me into shit storms under false pretenses. Three times now.”
“Three? How’s that?”
“Jeddah, Baghdad and Marta.” Lance raised a finger for each incident.
“Ah, I think we may be getting to the heart of the matter.”
“Almost killed her. That close.” Lance squeezed his fingers together for effect. “I’ve thought a lot about that recently. How you worked her into the story so seamlessly. You had her planted for years didn’t you.”
“Since she was a little girl. She is bar none the best I’ve ever had.” He turned to Fuchs for support.
“Bar none. She has been deeper than any of us.” Fuchs agreed. “No one like her.”
“Is she still in then? She implied she might be done.” Lance raised his eyebrows.
“Marta is recuperating in an undisclosed location. Someone shot her and whacked her in the head. But I don’t think that hurt her as much as something else you did.” Seibel left it there, but the implication was clear. “She has some decisions to make.” Seibel sat back down and took another sip of coffee. “But you want to know more about her, right?”
“I guess I just wanted to know what it’s like for you.” Lance ran his fingers through his short hair. “What it is like to put someone in so deep and then leave them dangling; to be killed by someone like me? You always talk about your investment in me. You had a lot more invested in her.”
“More than you know.” Seibel put both hands on the table.
“So just like that, you send her in where she can be wiped out any moment. After all the time, money, secrets. I guess that’s what I want to know. Not her really; I want to know what makes you tick?”
Seibel smiled at that. He turned to Fuchs and then back to his young pupil. “I really have to stop sometimes and remind myself how young you are; how raw you still are and how much you have to learn. You are such a brilliant bastard, such a piece of work and a goddamn cold-blooded murderer. I forget you’ve only been in for what, three years?”
He stood again and continued, “By the time I was 24, I’d seen too many men die. Killed more than a few myself. Fuchs here was a veteran of combat at 22, a multiple killer. Marta, she was old by 24. What she’d seen and lived through and done makes us all look like amateurs.
“Let me tell you Lance, you’ve only scratched the surface. Both in what you are capable of doing and in what you will experience.” He sat down to emphasize his next words. “I didn’t pick you out of thin air, or because you were some good looking punk.”
Lance asked, “Why did you pick me again? Was it because I almost shot you the first time I met you?”
“No, that was confirmation of my decision.” Seibel smiled, took another sip of coffee and leaned back in the chair. “Do you remember that short little questionnaire you answered in the career center at college, that form number T12A?”
“Yeah, somewhat.” Lance lied. He remembered it well. Eleven questions. Eleven answers made up on the spot.
“Well I remember it like it was yesterday. Those single sheets of paper go out to colleges, technical schools and high schools all across the country; around the world even. Thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of kids fill them out each year.” Seibel leaned back toward Lance. “How many do you think I receive each year?”
“Dozens, hundreds?” Lance guessed.
Seibel chuckled. “None, zip. Been that way for years. The unique profile that is required to answer those 11 questions correctly is so precise, so algorithmically miniscule in its variance, the way it slices and dices critical concepts, that no one ever meets it. No one that is, until one young man three years ago.”
“No one before that?” Lance raised his eyebrows.
“Or since.” Seibel nodded.
“What is the profile looking for if it is so precise, so selective? Did you design it?” Lance asked.
“Of course I designed it, with the help of a few psychologist friends, Braden among them. And what it is looking for in a quite precise, quite scientific and incomparably selective process is nothing short of the perfect spy, or better yet, the perfect candidate.”
Lance laughed. They all laughed together.
Lanced added. “The perfect spy. Like the novel?”
“Exactly. Except that spy wasn’t even close to perfect. No, my little profile tool has been so ingenious that it has kept me from wasting my time, our government’s time, on individuals who could never succeed. It eliminated every candidate, until that day I received your answers.”
The elder spy looked up at the ceiling, recalling a memory. “It was shocking at first. You know, you answered every question with the exact, the precise words the profile was built to capture. It was astounding when I shared it with those friends I mentioned.” Seibel’s eyes went cloudy for a moment as he drifted back to another time. “Imagine if you will, a loner, a pathological liar, an under-achiever in almost every category, a person who worked daily to remain anonymous, would be the one.”
“Astounding.” Lance chuckled.
“It got me thinking. I had been wrong. I had been recruiting, searching for specific types, for a certain and singular type. People like this guy.” He pointed his thumb at Fuchs. “Combat experts, incredible physical specimens, trained killers. I realized that I’d been wrong from the start. The perfect spy, the one, the pinnacle, didn’t need to be that type at all. Nothing wrong at all with him, but not the complete package I was truly looking for.”
“My feelings aren’t hurt even in the least.” Fuchs chortled.
“What I was really looking for was a liar, a cheat, a chameleon, an honest to goodness shape-shifter who could move from difficult circumstance to impossible situation without missing a beat. Oh, I’d tried actors, acrobats, even clowns before, but they were not fluid, not adaptable enough.”
“And they weren’t killers.” Fuchs added, matter of fact.
Papa nodded. “Precisely. They could be trained to kill, but it didn’t come naturally. There was always a moment of hesitation, a conversation they had with themselves before pulling the trigger.
“So, when I was handed a sheet of paper filled out in Tulsa, Oklahoma by one Lance Porter Priest, I was surprised, but not completely. I had been missing something and you finally showed me.”
“So, if can summarize,” Lance butt in. “I’m a liar, a cheat, a chameleon and a natural killer. At least according to that 11-question profile.”
“Correct. All the makings of the perfect spy.” Seibel added.
“Well then I’ve got a bit of news for you.”
Seibel’s eyebrows furrowed. “Okay, shoot.”
“I lied.”
“On the questionnaire?”