Reckless. Andrew Gross
Like CSI. The real CSI, not the TV glamour guys who took the bad guys down and, guns out, were first through the door.
Not that she couldn’t handle herself in that way if she had to.
Naomi was five foot three, fit as any field agent, wore stylish black glasses, and kept her dark hair short, Mika Brzezinski–style. She had what guys might call a sort of “bookish” look, like a library rat, despite, behind her frames, her brilliant gray eyes.
She hadn’t set out to be in this role. She had actually started out studying music theory at Princeton. Under Amos Kershorn. Her big claim to fame was being first cello in the Anne Arundel County High School Orchestra outside of Baltimore. Along with being an all-Ivy striker on the women’s field hockey team.
After 9/11, her twin brother, Jeremy, a lacrosse player at UVA, had dropped out and enlisted. All he said was it was something he just had to do. Growing up, the two of them couldn’t have been less alike and still come from the same womb. Jeremy was six foot two, wide shouldered, charismatic, solid as a rock. Cocky as all hell. Only started cracking the books the night before a test.
She was a foot shorter, quiet, to this day actually kept her driver’s license hidden behind her library card. She’d gotten the brains, they always joked, and Jer got whatever was leftover. After a tour in Iraq, he was sent to Fort Benning in Georgia as part of airborne ranger training, but in his second week there, the copter he was flying in crashed. He survived but lost both his legs. When she went to see him in the hospital—this big, brave, brawny guy, first-team all-ACC—he turned away. Empty. A shell of what he once was. Even a blind person could have seen the disappointment written onto his face.
Two days later, she left Princeton and signed up herself.
She had never really been into the military or overly patriotic before. Her dad was a newspaper editor in Baltimore. She just felt inside that it was something she had to do. In the steps of her big brother. She even pushed for Jer’s old regiment, but the army took a look at the fancy school she’d come from and those impressive test results and placed her into an intelligence unit. Naomi spent two years in Iraq as a junior member on the army’s internal investigative team. One of her assignments was to look into the bloodbath that occurred at Nisoor Square in Baghdad, where a handful of private security guards, claiming they were provoked, fired wildly into a crowded square, leaving seventeen Iraqis dead. Naomi pushed hard in her search, sure that an unprovoked and criminal act had been committed. She urged her superiors to detain the participants, but by that time the agency had secretly whisked the guilty contractors “out of country,” and the government seemed intent on papering everything over and letting them go.
Years later, it still burned her.
Naomi realized that the accountability went much higher, but by that point the result was merely a whitewash, a PR exercise, though in the wake of press exposure from her findings, the security outfit was forever banned from Iraq.
After her second tour—she saw action on a couple of hairy convoys—she opted out and went back to school. Changed her major to economics. A degree in music no longer carried the same weight in her new way of thinking of the world. She figured she’d go to law school, maybe Wall Street, do the sixteen-hour-days-until-you-make-partner thing, but when she was recommended to Treasury by a superior she had worked with in the field, and he told the department they would never find anyone smarter or more dogged on a case, something just clicked.
What clicked was the chance to finally feel she was making a difference.
She’d always been on the small side physically, and private. Part of her had always needed to prove that she was tough enough. It went back to the way she played attack on the field—hide on the flank, spot the opening, worm her way in among the bigger girls. Use her speed and guile and knowledge of the game.
Then hammer it home.
It was what she was still doing. At Treasury. She just happened to be the only one doing it with the five-note opening progression of Glass’s “Music in the Shape of a Square” tattooed on her butt.
Naomi looked again at the FBI security transcript. She sipped her smoothie. She didn’t know the caller, but she damn well knew the person he was caught speaking to.
And it wasn’t making a whole lot of sense.
The conversation had taken place about a month ago. Since then the world financial markets had fallen apart. The Dow was down 20 percent. One of the largest institutions brought down by a rogue trader.
And here was one of the most influential financial managers in the world, who oversaw one of the largest pools of investment capital anywhere, in contact with a suspected terrorist money mover.
And the cryptic words uttered in Arabic that had been passed along to her. That scared her. That left her wondering what this was all about.
The planes are in the air.
Monday afternoon, Hauck sat in his car across the street from the Lake Avenue Lower School in Greenwich.
Three weeks had passed since the Glassman murders. Still no link to their killers had been found.
At a little after two forty in the afternoon, a stream of kids began to emerge from the gray concrete building. Moms, in capri pants and yoga outfits, chatting with other moms or on their cells, pulling up their SUVs. Some of the kids carted stuff from school, brightly colored presentation boards or artwork, knapsacks slung over their shoulders. Others carried baseball gloves or lacrosse sticks, shouting excitedly about the Rangers’ playoff game tonight or American Idol. The cars pulled up; the kids climbed in; the moms waved goodbye to each other and drove away.
The entrance quieted down.
A couple of minutes later, Hauck saw the small, sandyhaired boy in jeans and a Derek Jeter jersey come out, holding on to the hand of an older man. His grand father. He carried a piece of paper all rolled up, a red knapsack slung over on his back.
Hauck remembered him as he saw him three or four years ago. In April’s car.
Evan.
It was his first day back at school after the incident. The local papers had picked it up. A couple of school officials came out and watched as he and his granddad made their way to the parking lot, making sure there were no reporters badgering them.
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