4. ABRAHAM
AbrAHAM
I DIDN’T KNOW what I was expecting when a Land Rover pulled up on my rear, but it wasn’t the young woman with dark skin, wearing a puffy white coat and popping chewing gum like a teenager, who got into my passenger seat.
Pulling out her laptop, she set it on her thighs without looking up.
“Before we get started, you need to understand something—I don’t work for you. No, you may not refer me. No, you may not contact me in the future. You keep your phone on, you answer when I call you. Do you agree to the terms?”
“Payment?” I asked.
“The terms,” she repeated.
“I accept.”
She nodded. “Throughout the process, I understand that you might have questions or concerns, but as I’m sure you’re aware, these next few hours are critical.
It would be in your best interest to prioritize the goal at hand over your natural curiosity.
I will ask you things that may feel out of order or seem irrelevant.
This is your first and only reminder that I will not hold your hand through this.
The moment I feel you’ve become uncooperative, I reserve the right to rescind my services.
If you’re comfortable with these stipulations, we can proceed. ”
“Understood.”
The woman nodded curtly. “What do you do for work?”
“I’m an associate of FX Resources Group out of Washington, DC. I mostly work in linguistics, but occasionally assist with K&R assignments with a few other partners. Roughly a year ago, I started working outside that purview on orders. Always solo assignments. Mostly long-range recon.”
“Tell me about your most recent assignment.”
I made the mistake of hesitating and the woman snapped her gum. “You can find the woman or hold onto your professional integrity, not both.”
I cleared my throat. “I was responsible for collecting intel on Yuran Hawk. Specifically, his behavioral patterns. It’s my belief and best guess that I was scouting him for the purpose of determining whether or not he could be turned.”
She didn’t react to the name and kept typing. “What’d you gather?”
“Hawk was a broker, not a trafficker, there’s a distinction.
He facilitated agreements between poor working-class men and women from destabilized nations and overseas companies utilizing legal unpaid labor.
But his clientele had been quietly voicing dissatisfaction for months.
Hawk overpromised and underdelivered on both ends.
He was in charge of organizing transport, liaising between the clientele and the product, but after months of manipulated flight logs, miscounts, missing laborers, it became clear he was either working of his own accord or following orders.
After several weeks, it became clear to me that the business was a cover and he was trafficking bodies for an unknown purpose.
He disappeared before I could find out more. ”
“He wasn’t the target.”
It wasn’t a question. “In the broader scope, probably not,” I admitted. “But he was my assignment.”
Matthias was known for dispensing pieces of intel to different agents in cases of breach or compromise. However, I wasn’t here in any official capacity. I was here because I was desperate. Which meant everything I didn’t know suddenly mattered.
“Did you ever make contact with him?” she asked.
“I don’t do that kind of work anymore. My role was strictly to observe and record.”
“I’m going to need all of your electronics,” she said. “Personal cell, burners, tablets, anything with a receiver that can be hacked or traced.”
I handed her my personal cell and burner.
“Those?” she gestured toward her ear.
“Older model. No Bluetooth,” I clarified. I didn’t tell her the hearing aids had been built and custom fitted by the very woman she was looking for. The least I could get away with, the better.
For the next half hour, she worked in silence and on the tail of my anxiety, followed guilt.
None of this was protocol. In fact, I couldn’t even be sure that I wasn’t making an irreparable fucking mistake.
All I knew was the second I’d arrived to an empty home, my wife’s car in the garage, her purse, keys, and phone on the counter, I couldn’t ignore that gut feeling that’d told me not to call Matthias first. In those initial moments of panic and thin slicing, my conscious and unconscious mind had apparently very quickly arrived at a general consensus—the one time I’d ignored my instincts, I’d paid for that lesson in blood.
I wasn’t about to make the same gamble twice.
“You don’t exist.”
I glanced up.
She turned the laptop so I could see the display.
On screen, was a death certificate I’d seen only once before where a still shot of a seated man with a sunken face that mirrored mine, wearing dress blues stared blankly at the camera.
“No gravesite. No obituary. Nothing notable about your life. Just a birth date and a death date. Certainly, no public attachments to a woman.”
I blinked. “Is that a question?”
“Who is she to you?”
I didn’t react. Marriages were public record. If she was as good as I’d been promised she’d eventually find the aliases attached to our paperwork and subsequently, everything else.
The nameless woman stopped typing and glanced up at me. “As a rule, men aren’t the ones who go looking for women. They’re the ones who disappear them. But your anger is regretful, not misdirected and you don’t smell like concern. You smell like fear.”
Exhaustion timing its best shot with my moment of weakness, I capitulated.
“When you asked me earlier if she wanted to be found… the truth is, I don’t know.
She’s in a similar field as you and she’s careful.
Her hard drives, her CPUs, her life’s work—she’d destroy it all before she left it unattended.
Six days before she asked for a separation, I came home and she’d cleared out her command center. That’s when I knew.”
“So, she was leaving you,” she said.
“She’d already left,” I corrected. “What I don’t know is why she came back, left her shit in my house, then disappeared into a camera blind spot, and never returned.”
A brief flicker of surprise crossed the woman’s hazel eyes, but she returned her attention to her laptop. However, instead of typing, she closed it.
“I don’t know you.”
“Probably for the best.”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t know of you. Which means, you must’ve had to burn a fuck ton of bridges to get to me.” She frowned at me. “I look for civilians.”
Handing a stranger more intel on me than I gave anyone, I told her the truth. “My wife is a civilian.”
The woman glared at me and I acquiesced. “You said you could help me.”
“That was before I knew you were government.”
Technically we were a localized private resources group that mostly specialized in close protection for politicians, businessmen, or the occasional celebrity.
More than a few of us worked K&R jobs as they came in and the CEO and founder, Matthias’s personal interests lent toward securing funding for defense tech developments, which was my wife’s department, but I didn’t bother making the distinction.
As for my personal life, there was a reason I’d disappeared and it was to prevent this exact fucking scenario.
If I’d compromised my wife somehow, if I was responsible for this in any way, I’d never forgive myself.
“I’m not asking you for a miracle, I’m asking you to locate her. The rest I can handle.”
The woman considered that. “And there’s no reason you can think of that she might have left of her own volition?”
“If you happen to find her of sound mind and body, and she doesn’t want to see me, lose my number. I’ll get the hint.”
The woman stared for an uncomfortable period. Then eventually nodded.
“New phones from this day forward. Take all calls in a secure location. Do not miss one. If you do, I will try again in exactly one hour. If you try to call back or miss the call a second time, I’ll consider the line compromised and disconnect it.
” She handed me a burner, similar to the one she confiscated from me and packed up her shit.
“Right now, we work this need to know only, but if I hit a wall, I’ll give you exactly one hour to decide how you’d like to proceed. ”
“Understood.”
The woman stared straight ahead. “You were right to come to me.”
I started to ask her what she meant by that but she exited my vehicle almost as stealthily as she entered. Then the Land Rover behind me sped off, leaving me alone in the charter school lot.